title: Great Barrington Declaration

text: Gregg Gonsalves, assistant professor of epidemiology at Yale University, described the strategy proposed by the declaration as "culling the herd of the sick and disabled", calling it "grotesque". Arguing nearly half the American population is considered to have underlying risk factors for the infection, he advocated for the prevailing quarantine strategy, since peaks in infection rates among the young were likely to correlate with deaths of more vulnerable older people. He wrote: "If you're going to turbo-charge community spread, as everyone else at 'low-risk' goes about their business, I want the plan for my 86-year-old mother to be more than theoretical."


title: Great Barrington Declaration

text: The Francis Crick Institute's group leader of the cell biology of infection laboratory, Rupert Beale, said herd immunity is "very unlikely" to be built up before a COVID-19 vaccine is generally implemented. Of the Great Barrington Declaration he said the "declaration prioritises just one aspect of a sensible strategy – protecting the vulnerable – and suggests we can safely build up 'herd immunity' in the rest of the population. This is wishful thinking. It is not possible to fully identify vulnerable individuals, and it is not possible to fully isolate them. Furthermore, we know that immunity to coronaviruses wanes over time, and re-infection is possible – so lasting protection of vulnerable individuals by establishing 'herd immunity' is very unlikely to be achieved in the absence of a vaccine." Beale described the declaration as "not a helpful contribution to the debate". Of the declarations' signatories he said: "There's a lot of other people who have also signed it and guess what, it's the usual suspects … It's Karol Sikora who knows nothing about this whatsoever but who is endlessly self-promoting, and you've got Michael Levitt who's got a bad case of Nobel Prize disease." Beale criticized Gupta's actions, saying, "You've got someone who has a track record of saying stuff that is total rubbish, and then moving on to the next thing which is total rubbish, and she's not being held to account. That makes people pretty annoyed." Of the declaration's other critics, Beale said: "That's everyone being polite … What everyone really thinks is, 'this is all fucking stupid'."


title: Great Barrington Declaration

text: Devi Sridhar, the University of Edinburgh's professor of global public health, said that the declaration "sounds good in theory" but that "if you actually work in practical public health on the front line, it doesn't make much sense", saying the declaration's premise was neither "accurate" nor "scientific". Michael Head, senior research fellow in global health at University of Southampton, said the declaration was "a very bad idea" and doubted if vulnerable people could avoid the virus if it were allowed to spread. He also said that "ultimately, the Barrington Declaration is based on principles that are dangerous to national and global public health". He said: "There are countries who are managing the pandemic relatively well, including South Korea and New Zealand, and their strategies do not include simply letting the virus run wild whilst hoping that the asthmatic community and the elderly can find somewhere to hide for 12 months." Associate professor at the University of Leeds's School of Medicine Stephen Griffin criticized the declaration's flaws in ethics, logistics, and science, pointing out the risk of long-term effects of infection in even those less vulnerable to severe infection. He said: "Ethically, history has taught us that the notion of segregating society, even perhaps with good initial intentions, usually ends in suffering." Simon Clarke, associate professor in cellular microbiology at the University of Reading, questioned whether herd immunity was possible for SARS-CoV-2: "Natural, lasting, protective immunity to the disease would be needed, and we don't know how effective or long-lasting people's post-infection immunity will be." Michael Osterholm, an American epidemiologist, regents professor, and director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, said that the Great Barrington Declaration was "a dangerous mix of pixie dust and pseudoscience."


title: Great Barrington Declaration

text: John M. Barry, a professor at the Tulane School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine and author of on the 1918 flu pandemic, wrote in "The New York Times" that the Great Barrington Declaration sounds attractive until one examines "three enormously important omissions". Firstly, it says nothing about harm suffered by people in low-risk groups, even though a significant number of patients who recover from COVID-19, including people who experience no symptoms, have been shown to have heart and lung damage. Secondly, it says nothing about how to shield the vulnerable, and thirdly, it says nothing about the number of dead the strategy would cause, which Barry estimates might "far exceed one million". Barry said that while it was too late for the United States to achieve "near containment of the virus", as South Korea, Australia and Japan had done, the US could still aim for results comparable to those of Canada or Germany, where daily deaths were a couple of dozen at the time of writing (October 2020).


title: Great Barrington Declaration

text: Writing for Science-Based Medicine, David Gorski said that the Great Barrington Declaration was a form of astroturfing similar to that which had previously been used for AIDS denial, climate change denial and creationism advocacy, but this time being deployed for COVID-19 denial, and amounted in practice to an argument for eugenics. Gorski speculated whether the scientists fronting the declaration were simply being useful idiots for AIER or whether they were actively being "motivated more by ideology than science", but said that the practical effect was that the declaration provided a narrative of scientific division useful for political purposes. The American Institute for Economic Research (AIER), at whose meeting the declaration was launched, has been described as a libertarian think tank that has received funding from the Koch Foundation and engages in climate change denial.


title: Great Barrington Declaration

text: Tyler Cowen, a libertarian economist at George Mason University, wrote that while he sympathized with a libertarian approach to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic, he considered the declaration to be dangerous and misguided.


title: Great Barrington Declaration

text: Citing the principle first do no harm, Matt Strauss, a physician and assistant professor at Queen's School of Medicine, subsequently wrote that mandatory government lockdowns "amount to a medical recommendation of no proven benefit, of extraordinary potential harm, that do not take personal values and individual consent into account" and that "if lockdowns were a prescription drug for Covid treatment, the FDA would never have approved it". University of Montreal's paediatrics and clinical ethics professor, Annie Janvier, a co-signatory and part of a group of Quebec scientists critical of the Government of Quebec's response to COVID-19, said that "it's not science that seems to be leading what's going on with COVID, it's public opinion and politics". She criticized the current lockdown measures in Canada, saying that "We need to protect the vulnerable, but right now in Quebec they're not protected".


title: Great Barrington Declaration

text: David Livermore, professor of medical microbiology at the University of East Anglia explained his decision to sign the declaration, saying that "never in history have we handled a pandemic like this" and that "future generations will look back aghast". Co-signatory Ellen Townsend, professor of psychology and leader of the self harm research group at the University of Nottingham, emphasised mental health concerns, stating that "one policy decision that could have the most significant impact for young people to protect their mental health both now and in the future, would be to release them from the lockdown as soon as possible". Mike Hulme, professor of human geology at the University of Cambridge said he had signed because he had "been frustrated that there hasn't been a sufficiently open public debate in the UK". Anthony Brooks, professor of genetics at the University of Leicester, criticized the British Government Chief Scientific Adviser, Patrick Vallance, alleging that "Being a senior vice president at a drug company doesn't give you the same background that others have. They're seeing things in a non-sophisticated way." Brooks also said that the high average age of the member of the British government's Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies has influenced their recommendations to the government, as many of the members are themselves "at risk" of serious infection.


title: Great Barrington Declaration

text: The Trump administration was reported to support the Great Barrington Declaration, based on statements made to "Newsweek" and other publications by senior advisers that were not authorized to speak on the record.


title: Great Barrington Declaration

text: On 5 October—the day after the date of the declaration—Gupta, Bhattacharya, and Kulldorff met the United States Secretary of Health and Human Services, Alex Azar, an appointee in the Cabinet of Donald Trump, and the neuroradiologist Scott Atlas, an adviser to the Trump administration's White House Coronavirus Task Force in Washington, D.C. Azar said the meeting was held "as part of our commitment to ensure we hear broad and diverse scientific perspectives" and that "we heard strong reinforcement of the Trump Administration's strategy of aggressively protecting the vulnerable while opening schools and the workplace", while Kulldorff stated that "we had a very good discussion. He asked many questions, and we put forth our case to protect the people who are vulnerable, and the idea of trying to do lockdowns to eliminate this disease is not realistic". Afterwards, Atlas also endorsed the declaration, telling "The Hill" that the "targeted protection of the vulnerable and opening schools and society policy matches the policy of the President and what I have advised". On the evening of 5 October, Donald Trump returned to the White House after several nights in the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, having undergone treatments for coronavirus disease; he told his followers on social media on his return "don't be afraid of it [COVID-19]".


title: Great Barrington Declaration

text: Bhattacharya denied that a herd immunity strategy was recommended by the declaration, saying that "a herd immunity strategy better describes the current lockdown policy", explaining "herd immunity is a biological fact so of course we mention it, but it is not our strategy". Gupta said that "the alternative [to herd immunity], which is to keep suppressing the virus, comes at an enormous cost to the poor and to the young and not just in this country [the United States] but worldwide", arguing that the herd immunity threshold for SARS-CoV-2 will be reached in December 2020. Bhattacharya advised that until that time vulnerable people might be housed away from multigenerational households, with government support, saying that "we could do policies that would make those resources available to older people in multigenerational settings for the limited period of time that's necessary until the disease is under control, and after time, they could go back home".


title: Great Barrington Declaration

text: In the UK, Conservative Party member of parliament for Wycombe, Steve Baker, having signed the declaration, spoke in favour of the declaration's policies on two occasions in the House of Commons, first on 6 October and again on 13 October. Conservative MP for New Forest West, Desmond Swayne asked the Leader of the House of Commons if a debate could be held on what he called "censorship" and "the sinister disappearance of the link from Google to the Great Barrington declaration". Conservative journalist Toby Young wrote an opinion piece in "The Spectator" supporting the declaration and querying the credentials of its critics, claiming they were "censors" and "smear merchants" while claiming the declaration's authors were not "outliers or cranks" but there had been a "well-orchestrated attempt to suppress and discredit it". On 1 November, eurosceptic former members of the European Parliament, Nigel Farage and Richard Tice, announced in "The Telegraph" that an application has been made to the Electoral Commission for their Brexit Party to be renamed Reform UK; after identifying the British government response to the COVID-19 pandemic as a more pressing issue than Brexit, the party is to advocate Focused Protection in accordance with the Great Barrington Declaration.


title: Great Barrington Declaration

text: On 6 October, the declaration was endorsed by "The Wall Street Journal"'s editorial board, who called it "the best advice for how we should cope with Covid."


title: Great Barrington Declaration

text: The John Snow Memorandum, the text of which was published simultaneously in "The Lancet" and dedicated site "www.johnsnowmemo.com", and built on a previous "The Lancet" correspondence piece, is a response by 80 researchers denouncing the Great Barrington Declaration and its herd immunity approach. Taking its name from John Snow, the epidemiologist who worked on the 1854 Broad Street cholera outbreak, it states that the herd immunity idea is "a dangerous fallacy unsupported by the scientific evidence". It acknowledges that COVID-19 restrictions have led to demoralization, making such an idea attractive, but states that "there is no evidence for lasting protective immunity to SARS-CoV-2", adding that "such a strategy would not lead to the end of COVID-19, but instead result in recurrent epidemics, as was the case with numerous infectious diseases before the advent of vaccination."


title: Great Barrington Declaration

text: The letter's authors were co-ordinated by Deepti Gurdasani, clinical epidemiologist at Queen Mary University of London, and included researchers and clinicians such as Marc Lipsitch, William Hanage, Nahid Bhadelia, Isabella Eckerle, Emma Hodcroft, Florian Krammer, Martin McKee, Dominic Pimenta, Viola Priesemann, Devi Sridhar, Gavin Yamey, and Rochelle Walensky.


title: Great Barrington Declaration

text: Other signatories have included Reinhard Busse, Christian Althaus, Jacques Fellay, Ilona Kickbusch, and David Stuckler.


title: Great Barrington Declaration

text: In 2022, John Ioannidis, a scientist who has opposed prolonged COVID-19 lockdowns, authored a paper in "BMJ Open" arguing that signatories of the Great Barrington Declaration were shunned as a fringe minority by those in favor of the John Snow Memorandum. According to him, the latter used their large numbers of followers on Twitter and other social media and op-eds to shape a scientific "groupthink" against the former, who had less influence as measured by the Kardashian Index. "The BMJ" published responses to his paper, including a comment by Gavin Yamey, David Gorski, and Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz which argued that Ioannidis's paper featured "factual errors, statistical shortcomings, failure to protect the named research subjects from harm, and potentially undeclared conflicts of interest that entirely undermine the analysis presented."


title: Homonym

text: In linguistics, homonyms are words which are homographs (words that share the same spelling, regardless of pronunciation), or homophones (equivocal words, that share the same pronunciation, regardless of spelling), or both. Using this definition, the words "row" (propel with oars), "row" (a linear arrangement) and "row" (an argument) are homonyms because they are homographs (though only the first two are homophones): so are the words "see" (vision) and "sea" (body of water), because they are homophones (though not homographs).


title: Homonym

text: A more restrictive and technical definition requires that homonyms be simultaneously homographs "and" homophones – that is to say they have identical spelling "and" pronunciation, but with different meanings. Examples are the pair "stalk" (part of a plant) and "stalk" (follow/harass a person) and the pair "left" (past tense of leave) and "left" (opposite of right).


title: Homonym

text: A distinction is sometimes made between true homonyms, which are unrelated in origin, such as "skate" (glide on ice) and "skate" (the fish), and polysemous homonyms, or polysemes, which have a shared origin, such as "mouth" (of a river) and "mouth" (of an animal).


title: Homonym

text: The relationship between a set of homonyms is called homonymy, and the associated adjective is homonymous, homonymic, or in latin, equivocal.


title: Homonym

text: The adjective "homonymous" can additionally be used wherever two items share the same name, independent of how closely they are or are not related in terms of their meaning or etymology. For example, the name Ōkami is homonymous with the Japanese term for "wolf" ("ōkami").


title: Homonym

text: The word "homonym" comes from the Greek ὁμώνυμος ("homonymos"), meaning "having the same name", compounded from ὁμός ("homos") 'common, same, similar' and ὄνομα ("onoma") 'name'.


title: Homonym

text: These meanings represent at least three etymologically separate lexemes, but share the one form, fluke.* Note that fluke is also a capitonym, in that Fluke Corporation (commonly referred to as simply "Fluke") is a manufacturer of industrial testing equipment.


title: Homonym

text: Similarly, a river bank, a savings bank, a bank of switches, and a bank shot in the game of pool share a common spelling and pronunciation, but differ in meaning.


title: Homonym

text: The words bow and bough are examples where there are two meanings associated with a single pronunciation and spelling (the weapon and the knot); two meanings with two different pronunciations (the knot and the act of bending at the waist), and two distinct meanings sharing the same sound but different spellings (bow, the act of bending at the waist, and bough, the branch of a tree). In addition, it has several related but distinct meanings – a bent line is sometimes called a 'bowed' line, reflecting its similarity to the weapon. Even according to the most restrictive definitions, various pairs of sounds and meanings of bow, Bow and bough are homonyms, homographs, homophones, heteronyms, heterographs, capitonyms and are polysemous.


title: Homonym

text: A lime can refer to a fruit or a material. A mold (mould) can refer to a fungus or an industrial cast.


title: Homonym

text: The words "there", "their", and "they're" are examples of three words that are of a singular pronunciation, have different spellings and vastly different meanings. These three words are commonly misused (or, alternatively, misspelled).


title: Homonym

text: Homonymy can lead to communicative conflicts and thus trigger lexical (onomasiological) change. This is known as "homonymic conflict". This leads to a species of informal fallacy of thought and argument called by the latin name equivocation.


title: Kunal Kapoor (actor, born 1959)

text: Kunal Kapoor (born 26 June 1959) is an Indian actor, film producer, director and advertisement maker. He is a son of actors Shashi Kapoor and Jennifer Kendal, who made his debut with the 1972 English-language film "Siddhartha", later acted in Shyam Benegal's "Junoon" and in his first mainstream Bollywood film, "Ahista Ahista", opposite Padmini Kolhapure as well as "Vijeta". He also acted in the art films "Utsav" (1984) and "Trikal" (1985).


title: Kunal Kapoor (actor, born 1959)

text: In 1987, he stopped acting after "Trikal" to set up his own company, Adfilm-Valas, to produce and direct television commercials. Adfilm Valas has also line-produced for many international feature films and ad films shot in India. Notably, the credit sequence of the film "City of Joy", and the French films "Le Cactus" (2005) and "Fire in Paradise".


title: Kunal Kapoor (actor, born 1959)

text: Kunal Kapoor was born into the famous first family of Bollywood, the Kapoor family, the eldest child of Shashi Kapoor and his British theater-actress wife Jennifer Kapoor. His paternal grandfather, Prithviraj Kapoor, was a doyen of the theatre, a pioneer of the Indian film industry and the progenitor of the famous Kapoor family. His maternal grandfather, Geoffrey Kendal, was a British theatre personality. Kapoor's mother, Jennifer, died of cancer in 1984, while his father, Shashi Kapoor, died in December 2017.


title: Kunal Kapoor (actor, born 1959)

text: Kapoor's siblings are Karan Kapoor (b. 18 January 1962) and Sanjana Thapar (b. 27 November 1967). Karan, a popular model who also worked in a few films in the 1980s, now runs a photography business in the UK. Sanjana Thapar runs the ancestral Prithvi Theatre and is married to Valmik Thapar, a noted conservationist.


title: Kunal Kapoor (actor, born 1959)

text: Kunal was married to filmmaker Ramesh Sippy's daughter Sheena, who is a well-known photographer. They had two children together, a son named Zahan Prithviraj Kapoor, and a daughter named Shaira Kapoor. Kunal and Sheena are now divorced.


title: Literary realism

text: Literary realism is a literary genre, part of the broader realism in arts, that attempts to represent subject-matter truthfully, avoiding speculative fiction and supernatural elements. It originated with the realist art movement that began with mid-nineteenth-century French literature (Stendhal) and Russian literature (Alexander Pushkin). Literary realism attempts to represent familiar things as they are. Realist authors chose to depict everyday and banal activities and experiences.


title: Literary realism

text: Broadly defined as "the representation of reality", realism in the arts is the attempt to represent subject matter truthfully, without artificiality and avoiding artistic conventions, as well as implausible, exotic and supernatural elements. Realism has been prevalent in the arts at many periods, and is in large part a matter of technique and training, and the avoidance of stylization. In the visual arts, illusionistic realism is the accurate depiction of lifeforms, perspective, and the details of light and colour. Realist works of art may emphasize the ugly or sordid, such as works of social realism, regionalism, or kitchen sink realism. There have been various realism movements in the arts, such as the opera style of verismo, literary realism, theatrical realism and Italian neorealist cinema. The realism art movement in painting began in France in the 1850s, after the 1848 Revolution. The realist painters rejected Romanticism, which had come to dominate French literature and art, with roots in the late 18th century.


title: Literary realism

text: Realism as a movement in literature was a post-1848 phenomenon, according to its first theorist Jules-Français Champfleury. It aims to reproduce "objective reality", and focused on showing everyday, quotidian activities and life, primarily among the middle or lower class society, without romantic idealization or dramatization. It may be regarded as the general attempt to depict subjects as they are considered to exist in third person objective reality, without embellishment or interpretation and "in accordance with secular, empirical rules." As such, the approach inherently implies a belief that such reality is ontologically independent of man's conceptual schemes, linguistic practices and beliefs, and thus can be known (or knowable) to the artist, who can in turn represent this 'reality' faithfully. As literary critic Ian Watt states in "The Rise of the Novel", modern realism "begins from the position that truth can be discovered by the individual through the senses" and as such "it has its origins in Descartes and Locke, and received its first full formulation by Thomas Reid in the middle of the eighteenth century."


title: Literary realism

text: In the Introduction to "The Human Comedy" (1842) Balzac "claims that poetic creation and scientific creation are closely related activities, manifesting the tendency of realists towards taking over scientific methods". The artists of realism used the achievements of contemporary science, the strictness and precision of the scientific method, in order to understand reality. The positivist spirit in science presupposes feeling contempt towards metaphysics, the cult of the fact, experiment and proof, confidence in science and the progress that it brings, as well as striving to give a scientific form to studying social and moral phenomena."


title: Literary realism

text: In the late 18th century Romanticism was a revolt against the aristocratic social and political norms of the previous Age of Reason and a reaction against the scientific rationalization of nature found in the dominant philosophy of the 18th century, as well as a reaction to the Industrial Revolution. It was embodied most strongly in the visual arts, music, and literature, but had a major impact on historiography, education and the natural sciences.


title: Literary realism

text: 19th-century realism was in its turn a reaction to Romanticism, and for this reason it is also commonly derogatorily referred as traditional or "bourgeois realism". However, not all writers of Victorian literature produced works of realism. The rigidities, conventions, and other limitations of Victorian realism prompted in their turn the revolt of modernism. Starting around 1900, the driving motive of modernist literature was the criticism of the 19th-century bourgeois social order and world view, which was countered with an antirationalist, antirealist and antibourgeois program.


title: Literary realism

text: Social Realism is an international art movement that includes the work of painters, printmakers, photographers and filmmakers who draw attention to the everyday conditions of the working classes and the poor, and who are critical of the social structures that maintain these conditions. While the movement's artistic styles vary from nation to nation, it almost always uses a form of descriptive or critical realism.


title: Literary realism

text: Kitchen sink realism (or kitchen sink drama) is a term coined to describe a British cultural movement that developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s in theatre, art, novels, film and television plays, which used a style of social realism. Its protagonists usually could be described as angry young men, and it often depicted the domestic situations of working-class Britons living in cramped rented accommodation and spending their off-hours drinking in grimy pubs, to explore social issues and political controversies.


title: Literary realism

text: The films, plays and novels employing this style are set frequently in poorer industrial areas in the North of England, and use the rough-hewn speaking accents and slang heard in those regions. The film "It Always Rains on Sunday" (1947) is a precursor of the genre, and the John Osborne play "Look Back in Anger" (1956) is thought of as the first of the genre. The gritty love-triangle of "Look Back in Anger", for example, takes place in a cramped, one-room flat in the English Midlands. The conventions of the genre have continued into the 2000s, finding expression in such television shows as "Coronation Street" and "EastEnders".


title: Literary realism

text: In art, "Kitchen Sink School" was a term used by critic David Sylvester to describe painters who depicted social realist–type scenes of domestic life.


title: Literary realism

text: Socialist realism is the official Soviet art form that was institutionalized by Joseph Stalin in 1934 and was later adopted by allied Communist parties worldwide. This form of realism held that successful art depicts and glorifies the proletariat's struggle toward socialist progress. The Statute of the Union of Soviet Writers in 1934 stated that socialist realism


title: Literary realism

text: The strict adherence to the above tenets, however, began to crumble after the death of Stalin when writers started expanding the limits of what is possible. However, the changes were gradual since the social realism tradition was so ingrained into the psyche of the Soviet literati that even dissidents followed the habits of this type of composition, rarely straying from its formal and ideological mold. The Soviet socialist realism did not exactly emerge on the very day it was promulgated in the Soviet Union in 1932 by way of a decree that abolished independent writers' organizations. This movement has been existing for at least fifteen years and was first seen during the Bolshevik Revolution. The 1934 declaration only formalized its canonical formulation through the speeches of the Andrei Zhdanov, the representative of the Party's Central Committee.


title: Literary realism

text: The official definition of social realism has been criticized for its conflicting framework. While the concept itself is simple, discerning scholars struggle in reconciling its elements. According to Peter Kenez, "it was impossible to reconcile the teleological requirement with realistic presentation," further stressing that "the world could either be depicted as it was or as it should be according to theory, but the two are obviously not the same."


title: Literary realism

text: Naturalism was a literary movement or tendency from the 1880s to 1930s that used detailed realism to suggest that social conditions, heredity, and environment had inescapable force in shaping human character. It was a mainly unorganized literary movement that sought to depict believable everyday reality, as opposed to such movements as Romanticism or Surrealism, in which subjects may receive highly symbolic, idealistic or even supernatural treatment.


title: Literary realism

text: Naturalism was an outgrowth of literary realism, influenced by Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. Whereas realism seeks only to describe subjects as they really are, naturalism also attempts to determine "scientifically" the underlying forces (e.g., the environment or heredity) influencing the actions of its subjects. Naturalistic works often include supposed sordid subject matter, for example, Émile Zola's frank treatment of sexuality, as well as a pervasive pessimism. Naturalistic works tend to focus on the darker aspects of life, including poverty, racism, violence, prejudice, disease, corruption, prostitution, and filth. As a result, naturalistic writers were frequently criticized for focusing too much on human vice and misery.


title: Literary realism

text: In the early nineteenth century, there was growing impetus to establish an Australian culture that was separate from its English Colonial beginnings. Common artistic motifs and characters that were represented in Australian realism were the Australian Outback, known simply as "the bush", in its harsh and volatile beauty, the British settlers, the Indigenous Australian, the squatter and the digger–although some of these bordered into a more mythic territory in much of Australia's art scene. A significant portion of Australia's early realism was a rejection of, according to what the "Sydney Bulletin" called in 1881 a "romantic identity" of the country.


title: Literary realism

text: Most of the earliest writing in the colony was not literature in the most recent international sense, but rather journals and documentations of expeditions and environments, although literary style and preconceptions entered into the journal writing. Oftentimes in early Australian literature, romanticism and realism co-existed, as exemplified by Joseph Furphy's "Such Is Life" (1897)–a fictional account of the life of rural dwellers, including bullock drivers, squatters and itinerant travellers, in southern New South Wales and Victoria, during the 1880s. Catherine Helen Spence's "Clara Morison" (1854), which detailed a Scottish woman's immigration to Adelaide, South Australia, in a time when many people were leaving the freely settled state of South Australia to claim fortunes in the gold rushes of Victoria and New South Wales.


title: Literary realism

text: The burgeoning literary concept that Australia was an extension of another, more distant country, was beginning to infiltrate into writing: "[those] who have at last understood the significance of Australian history as a transplanting of stocks and the sending down of roots in a new soil". Henry Handel Richardson, author of post-Federation novels such as "Maurice Guest" (1908) and "The Getting of Wisdom" (1910), was said to have been heavily influenced by French and Scandinavian realism. In the twentieth century, as the working-class community of Sydney proliferated, the focus was shifted from the bush archetype to a more urban, inner-city setting: William Lane's "The Working Man's Paradise" (1892), Christina Stead's "Seven Poor Men of Sydney" (1934) and Ruth Park's "The Harp in the South" (1948) all depicted the harsh, gritty reality of working class Sydney. Patrick White's novels "Tree of Man" (1955) and "Voss" (1957) fared particularly well and in 1973 White was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.


title: Literary realism

text: A new kind of literary realism emerged in the late twentieth century, helmed by Helen Garner's "Monkey Grip" (1977) which revolutionised contemporary fiction in Australia, though it has since emerged that the novel was diaristic and based on Garner's own experiences. "Monkey Grip" concerns itself with a single-mother living in a succession of Melbourne share-houses, as she navigates her increasingly obsessive relationship with a drug addict who drifts in and out of her life. A sub-set of realism emerged in Australia's literary scene known as "dirty realism", typically written by "new, young authors" who examined "gritty, dirty, real existences", of lower-income young people, whose lives revolve around a nihilistic pursuit of casual sex, recreational drug use and alcohol, which are used to escape boredom. Examples of dirty-realism include Andrew McGahan's "Praise" (1992), Christos Tsiolkas's "Loaded" (1995), Justine Ettler's "The River Ophelia" (1995) and Brendan Cowell's "How It Feels" (2010), although many of these, including their predecessor "Monkey Grip", are now labelled with a genre coined in 1995 as "grunge lit".


title: Literary realism

text: Ian Watt in "The Rise of the Novel" (1957) saw the novel as originating in the early 18th-century and he argued that the novel's 'novelty' was its 'formal realism': the idea 'that the novel is a full and authentic report of human experience'. His examples are novelists Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding. Watt argued that the novel's concern with realistically described relations between ordinary individuals, ran parallel to the more general development of philosophical realism, middle-class economic individualism and Puritan individualism. He also claims that the form addressed the interests and capacities of the new middle-class reading public and the new book trade evolving in response to them. As tradesmen themselves, Defoe and Richardson had only to 'consult their own standards' to know that their work would appeal to a large audience.


title: Literary realism

text: Later in the 19th century George Eliot's (1819–1880) "" (1871–72), described by novelists Martin Amis and Julian Barnes as the greatest novel in the English language, is a work of realism. Through the voices and opinions of different characters the reader becomes aware of important issues of the day, including the Reform Bill of 1832, the beginnings of the railways, and the state of contemporary medical science. "Middlemarch" also shows the deeply reactionary mindset within a settled community facing the prospect of what to many is unwelcome social, political and technological change.


title: Literary realism

text: While George Gissing (1857–1903), author of "New Grub Street" (1891), amongst many other works, has traditionally been viewed as a naturalist, mainly influenced by Émile Zola, Jacob Korg has suggested that George Eliot was a greater influence.


title: Literary realism

text: Other novelists, such as Arnold Bennett (1867–1931) and Anglo-Irishman George Moore (1852–1933), consciously imitated the French realists. Bennett's most famous works are the "Clayhanger" trilogy (1910–18) and "The Old Wives' Tale" (1908). These books draw on his experience of life in the Staffordshire Potteries, an industrial area encompassing the six towns that now make up Stoke-on-Trent in Staffordshire, England. George Moore, whose most famous work is "Esther Waters" (1894), was also influenced by the naturalism of Zola.


title: Literary realism

text: William Dean Howells (1837–1920) was the first American author to bring a realist aesthetic to the literature of the United States. His stories of middle and upper class life set in the 1880s and 1890s are highly regarded among scholars of American fiction. His most popular novel, "The Rise of Silas Lapham" (1885), depicts a man who, ironically, falls from materialistic fortune by his own mistakes. Other early American realists include Samuel Clemens (1835–1910), better known by his pen name of Mark Twain, author of "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" (1884), and Stephen Crane (1871–1900).


title: Literary realism

text: Twain's style, based on vigorous, realistic, colloquial American speech, gave American writers a new appreciation of their national voice. Twain was the first major author to come from the interior of the country, and he captured its distinctive, humorous slang and iconoclasm. For Twain and other American writers of the late 19th century, realism was not merely a literary technique: It was a way of speaking truth and exploding worn-out conventions. Crane was primarily a journalist who also wrote fiction, essays, poetry, and plays. Crane saw life at its rawest, in slums and on battlefields. His haunting Civil War novel, "The Red Badge of Courage", was published to great acclaim in 1895, but he barely had time to bask in the attention before he died, at 28, having neglected his health. He has enjoyed continued success ever since—as a champion of the common man, a realist, and a symbolist. Crane's "" (1893), is one of the best, if not the earliest, naturalistic American novel. It is the harrowing story of a poor, sensitive young girl whose uneducated, alcoholic parents utterly fail her. In love, and eager to escape her violent home life, she allows herself to be seduced into living with a young man, who soon deserts her. When her self-righteous mother rejects her, Maggie becomes a prostitute to survive but soon dies. Crane's earthy subject matter and his objective, scientific style, devoid of moralizing, earmark Maggie as a naturalist work.


title: Literary realism

text: Other later American realists are John Steinbeck, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, Jack London, Edith Wharton and Henry James.


title: Literary realism

text: Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) is the most prominent representative of 19th-century realism in fiction through the inclusion of specific detail and recurring characters. His "La Comédie humaine", a vast collection of nearly 100 novels, was the most ambitious scheme ever devised by a writer of fiction—nothing less than a complete contemporary history of his countrymen. Realism is also an important aspect of the works of Alexandre Dumas, fils (1824–1895).


title: Literary realism

text: Many of the novels in this period, including Balzac's, were published in newspapers in serial form, and the immensely popular realist "roman feuilleton" tended to specialize in portraying the hidden side of urban life (crime, police spies, criminal slang), as in the novels of Eugène Sue. Similar tendencies appeared in the theatrical melodramas of the period and, in an even more lurid and gruesome light, in the Grand Guignol at the end of the century. Aleksis Kivi (1834–1872), known today as the "national author of Finland", wrote his only novel "The Seven Brothers" (1870), which was strongly influenced by Cervantes, and which received at time a very negative reception from critics because its contemporary descriptions of the life of a Finnish peasants in an unadorned realism, long before the work achieved the status of a national novel.


title: Literary realism

text: Gustave Flaubert's (1821–1880) acclaimed novels "Madame Bovary" (1857), which reveals the tragic consequences of romanticism on the wife of a provincial doctor, and "Sentimental Education" (1869) represent perhaps the highest stages in the development of French realism. Flaubert also wrote other works in an entirely different style and his romanticism is apparent in the fantastic "The Temptation of Saint Anthony" (final version published 1874) and the baroque and exotic scenes of ancient Carthage in "Salammbô" (1862).


title: Literary realism

text: In German literature, 19th-century realism developed under the name of "Poetic Realism" or "Bourgeois Realism," and major figures include Theodor Fontane, Gustav Freytag, Gottfried Keller, Wilhelm Raabe, Adalbert Stifter, and Theodor Storm.


title: Literary realism

text: In Italian literature, the realism genre developed a detached description of the social and economic conditions of people in their time and environment. Major figures of Italian Verismo include Luigi Capuana, Giovanni Verga, Federico De Roberto, Matilde Serao, Salvatore Di Giacomo, and Grazia Deledda, who in 1926 received the Nobel Prize for Literature.


title: Literary realism

text: Later realist writers included Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Benito Pérez Galdós, Guy de Maupassant, Anton Chekhov, Leopoldo Alas (Clarín), José Maria de Eça de Queiroz, Henryk Sienkiewicz, Bolesław Prus and, in a sense, Émile Zola, whose naturalism is often regarded as an offshoot of realism.


title: Literary realism

text: Theatrical realism was a general movement in 19th-century theatre from the time period of 1870–1960 that developed a set of dramatic and theatrical conventions with the aim of bringing a greater fidelity of real life to texts and performances. Part of a broader artistic movement, it shared many stylistic choices with naturalism, including a focus on everyday (middle-class) drama, ordinary speech, and dull settings. Realism and naturalism diverge chiefly on the degree of choice that characters have: while naturalism believes in the overall strength of external forces over internal decisions, realism asserts the power of the individual to choose (see "A Doll's House").


title: Literary realism

text: Russia's first professional playwright, Aleksey Pisemsky, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy ("The Power of Darkness" (1886)), began a tradition of psychological realism in Russia which culminated with the establishment of the Moscow Art Theatre by Constantin Stanislavski and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko. Their ground-breaking productions of the plays of Anton Chekhov in turn influenced Maxim Gorky and Mikhail Bulgakov. Stanislavski went on to develop his 'system', a form of actor training that is particularly suited to psychological realism.


title: Literary realism

text: 19th-century realism is closely connected to the development of modern drama, which, as Martin Harrison explains, "is usually said to have begun in the early 1870s" with the "middle-period" work of the Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen. Ibsen's realistic drama in prose has been "enormously influential."


title: Literary realism

text: In opera, "verismo" refers to a post-Romantic Italian tradition that sought to incorporate the naturalism of Émile Zola and Henrik Ibsen. It included realistic – sometimes sordid or violent – depictions of contemporary everyday life, especially the life of the lower classes.


title: Literary realism

text: In France in addition to melodramas, popular and bourgeois theater in the mid-century turned to realism in the "well-made" bourgeois farces of Eugène Marin Labiche and the moral dramas of Émile Augier.


title: Literary realism

text: Critics of realism cite that depicting reality is not often realistic with some observers calling it "imaginary" or "project". This argument is based on the idea that we do not often get what is real correctly. To present reality, we draw on what is "real" according to how we remember it as well as how we experience it. However, remembered or experienced reality does not always correspond to what the truth is. Instead, we often obtain a distorted version of it that is only related to what is out there or how things really are. Realism is criticized for its supposed inability to address this challenge and such failure is seen as tantamount to complicity in a creating a process wherein "the artefactual nature of reality is overlooked or even concealed." According to Catherine Gallagher, realistic fiction invariably undermines, in practice, the ideology it purports to exemplify because if appearances were as self-sufficient, there would probably be no need for novels. This can be demonstrated in the literary naturalism's focus in the United States during the late nineteenth century on the larger forces that determine the lives of its characters as depicted in agricultural machines portrayed as immense and terrible, shredding "entangled" human bodies without compunction. The machines were used as a metaphor but it contributed to the perception that such narratives were more like myth than reality.


title: Literary realism

text: There are also critics who fault realism in the way it supposedly defines itself as a reaction to the excesses of literary genres such as Romanticism and the Gothic – those that focus on the exotic, sentimental, and sensational narratives. Some scholars began to call this an impulse to contradict so that in the end, the limit that it imposes on itself leads to "either the representation of verifiable and objective truth or the merely relative, some partial, subjective truth, therefore no truth at all."


title: Literary realism

text: There are also critics who cite the absence of a fixed definition. The argument is that there is no pure form of realism and the position that it is almost impossible to find literature that is not in fact realist, at least to some extent while, and that whenever one searches for pure realism, it vanishes. J.P. Stern countered this position when he maintained that this "looseness" or "untidiness" makes the term indispensable in common and literary discourse alike. Others also dismiss it as obvious and simple-minded while denying realistic aesthetic, branding as pretentious since it is considered mere reportage, not art, and based on naïve metaphysics.


title: Music recording certification

text: Music recording certification is a system of certifying that a music recording has shipped, sold, or streamed a certain number of units. The threshold quantity varies by type (such as album, single, music video) and by nation or territory (see List of music recording certifications).


title: Music recording certification

text: Almost all countries follow variations of the RIAA certification categories, which are named after precious materials (gold, platinum and diamond).


title: Music recording certification

text: The threshold required for these awards depends upon the population of the territory where the recording is released. Typically, they are awarded only to international releases and are awarded individually for each country where the album is sold. Different sales levels, some perhaps 10 times greater than others, may exist for different music media (for example: videos versus albums, singles, or music download).


title: Music recording certification

text: The original gold and silver record awards were presented to artists by their own record companies to publicize their sales achievements. The first silver disc was awarded by Regal Zonophone to George Formby in December 1937 for sales of 100,000 copies of "The Window Cleaner". The first gold disc was awarded by RCA Victor (under division imprint Bluebird Records) to Glenn Miller and His Orchestra in February 1942, celebrating the sale of 1.2 million copies of the single, "Chattanooga Choo Choo". Another example of a company award is the gold record awarded to Elvis Presley in 1956 for one million units sold of his single "Don't Be Cruel" or Decca’s gold record to Jerry Lewis for "Rock-a-Bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody". The first gold record for an LP was awarded by RCA Victor to Harry Belafonte in 1957 for the album "Calypso" (1956), the first album to sell over 1,000,000 copies in RCA's reckoning.


title: Music recording certification

text: At the industry level, in 1958 the Recording Industry Association of America introduced its gold record award program for records of any kind, albums or singles, which achieved one million dollars in retail sales. These sales were restricted to U.S.-based record companies and did not include exports to other countries. For albums in 1968, this would mean shipping approximately 250,000 units; for singles the number would be higher due to their lower retail price. The platinum certification was introduced in 1976 for the sale of one million units for albums and two million for singles, with the gold certification redefined to mean sales of 500,000 units for albums and one million for singles. No album was certified platinum prior to this year. For instance, the recording by Van Cliburn of the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto from 1958 would eventually be awarded a platinum citation, but this would not happen until two decades after its release. In 1999, the diamond certification was introduced for sales of ten million units. In the late 1980s, the certification thresholds for singles were dropped to match that of albums.


title: Music recording certification

text: Other recording artists received special and symbolic recognitions, including Raphael with a "Uranium disc" granted by Hispavox and SGAE in 1980, and Luis Fonsi received the "Plutonium disc" from Universal Music Group recognizing the global sales of "Despacito" in 2017.


title: Music recording certification

text: The first official designation of a "gold record" by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) was established for singles in 1958, and the RIAA also trademarked the term "gold record" in the United States. On 14 March 1958, the RIAA certified its first gold record, Perry Como's hit single "Catch a Falling Star". The "Oklahoma!" soundtrack was certified as the first gold album four months later. In 1976, RIAA introduced the platinum certification, first awarded to the Eagles compilation album "Their Greatest Hits (1971–1975)" on 24 February 1976, and to Johnnie Taylor's single "Disco Lady" on 22 April 1976. As music sales increased with the introduction of compact discs, the RIAA created the Multi-Platinum award in 1984. Diamond awards, honoring those artists whose sales of singles or albums reached 10,000,000 copies, were introduced in 1999.


title: Music recording certification

text: In the 20th century, and for a part of the first decade of the 21st, it was common for distributors to claim certifications based on their shipments – wholesale to retail outlets – which led to many certifications which outstripped the actual final retail sales figures. This became much less common once the majority of retail sales became paid digital downloads and digital streaming.


title: Music recording certification

text: In most countries, certifications no longer apply solely to physical media but now also include sales awards recognizing digital downloads (in the US and UK since 2004). In June 2006, the RIAA also certified the ringtone downloads of songs. Streaming from on-demand services such as Apple Music, Spotify, Tidal and Napster has been included into existing digital certification in the US since 2013, and the UK and Germany since 2014. In the US and Germany, video streaming services like YouTube, VEVO, and Yahoo! Music also began to be counted towards the certification, in both cases using the formula of 100 streams being equivalent to one download. Other countries, such as Denmark and Spain, maintain separate awards for digital download singles and streaming.


title: Music recording certification

text: The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) was founded in 1996, and grants the IFPI Platinum Europe Award for album sales over one million within Europe and (as of October 2009) the Middle East. Multi-platinum Europe Awards are presented for sales in subsequent multiples of one million. Eligibility is unaffected by time (from date of release), and is not restricted to European-based artists.


title: Music recording certification

text: The Independent Music Companies Association (IMPALA) was founded in April 2000 to grow the independent music sector and promote independent music in the interests of artistic, entrepreneurial and cultural diversity. IMPALA launched sales awards in 2005 as the first sales awards recognising that success on a pan-European basis begins well before sales reach one million. The award levels are Silver (20,000+), Double Silver (40,000+), Gold (75,000+), Double Gold (150,000+), Diamond (200,000+), Platinum (400,000+) and Double Platinum (800,000+).


title: Music recording certification

text: Below are certification thresholds for the United States, United Kingdom, Canada and France. The numbers in the tables are in terms of "units", where a unit represents one sale or one shipment of a given medium. Certification is often awarded cumulatively, and it is possible for a single album to be certified silver, gold, and platinum in turn. An album that becomes Platinum twice over, for example, an album which has sold 2,000,000 copies in the United States, is said to be "Double-Platinum", or sometimes "Multi-Platinum". Since 2013 in the U.S., and 2014 in the UK and Germany, streaming of songs counts towards certification of singles with 150 streams being the equivalent of 1 unit sold. Since February 2016, RIAA includes on-demand audio and video streams and a track sale equivalent in Gold and Platinum Album Award. The program will count both sales and streams for single and album certifications.


title: Music recording certification

text: The plaques themselves contain various items under the glass. Modern awards often use CDs instead of records. Most gold and platinum records are actually vinyl records which have been vacuum metallized and tinted, while trimmed and plated metal "masters", "mothers", or "stampers" (metal parts used for pressing records out of vinyl) were initially used. The music in the grooves on the record may not match the actual recording being awarded. Individual plaque-makers produced their awards according to available materials and techniques employed by their graphic arts departments. The plaques, depending on size and elaborateness of design, cost anywhere between US$135 and $275, most often ordered and purchased by the record label that issued the original recording.


title: Revised Romanization of Korean

text: Revised Romanization of Korean () is the official Korean language romanization system in South Korea. It was developed by the National Academy of the Korean Language from 1995 and was released to the public on 7 July 2000 by South Korea's Ministry of Culture and Tourism in Proclamation No. 2000-8.


title: Revised Romanization of Korean

text: The new system addressed problems in the implementation of the McCune–Reischauer system, such as the phenomena where different consonants and vowels became indistinguishable in the absence of special symbols. To be specific, under the McCune–Reischauer system, Korean consonants  "(k)",  "(t)",  "(p)" and  "(ch)" and  "(kʼ)",  "(tʼ)",  "(pʼ)" and  "(chʼ)" became indistinguishable when the apostrophe was removed. In addition, Korean vowels  "(ŏ)" and  "(o)", as well as  "(ŭ)" and  "(u)", became indistinguishable when the breve was removed. Especially in internet use, where omission of apostrophes and breves is common, this caused many Koreans as well as foreigners confusion. Hence, the revision was made with the belief that if McCune–Reischauer was left unrevised, it would continue to confuse people, both Koreans and foreigners.


title: Revised Romanization of Korean

text: In addition, special provisions are for regular phonological rules in exceptions to transliteration (see Korean phonology).


title: Revised Romanization of Korean

text: Almost all road signs, names of railway and subway stations on line maps and signs, etc. have been changed according to Revised Romanization of Korean ("RR", also called "South Korean" or "Ministry of Culture (MC) 2000"). It is estimated to have cost at least 500 billion won to 600 billion won (US$500~600 million) to carry out this procedure. All Korean textbooks, maps and signs to do with cultural heritage were required to comply with the new system by 28 February 2002. Romanization of surnames and existing companies' names has been left untouched because of the reasons explained below. However, the Korean government encourages using the revised romanization of Korean for the new names.


title: Revised Romanization of Korean

text: Like several European languages that have undergone spelling reforms (such as Portuguese, German or Swedish), the Revised Romanization is not expected to be adopted as the official romanization of Korean family names. This is because the conditions for allowing changes in romanization of surnames in passport is very strict. The reasons are outlined below.


title: Revised Romanization of Korean

text: 1. Countries around the world manage information about foreigners who are harmful to the public safety of their countries, including international criminals and illegal immigrants by the Roman name and date of birth of the passport they have used in the past. If a passport holder is free to change their listed Roman name, it would pose a serious risk to border management due to difficulty in determining identities.


title: Revised Romanization of Korean

text: 2. The people of a country where it is free to change the official Roman name will be subject to strict immigration checks, which will inevitably cause inconvenience to the people of that country.


title: Revised Romanization of Korean

text: 3. Arbitrary changes in the romanization of passports can lead to a fall in the credibility of the passports and national credit, which can have a negative impact on new visa waiver agreements, etc.


title: Revised Romanization of Korean

text: With very few exceptions, it is impossible for a person who has ever left the country under their romanized name to change their family name again. However, South Korea's Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism encourages those who “newly” register their romanized names to follow the Revised Romanization of Korean. In addition, North Korea continues to use a version of the McCune–Reischauer system of romanization, a different version of which was in official use in South Korea from 1984 to 2000.


title: Revised Romanization of Korean

text: Textbooks and dictionaries intended for students of the Korean language tend to include this Romanization. However, some publishers have acknowledged the difficulties or confusion it can cause for non-native Korean speakers who are unused to the conventions of this style of Romanization.


title: Revised Romanization of Korean

text: , , and are transcribed as "g", "d", "b" and "r" when placed at the initial of a word or before a vowel, and as "k", "t", "p" and "l" when followed by another consonant or when appearing at the end of a word.


title: Revised Romanization of Korean

text: The revised romanization transcribes certain phonetic changes that occur with combinations of the ending consonant of a character and the initial consonant of the next like "Hanguk" → "Hangugeo". These significant changes occur (highlighted in yellow):


title: Revised Romanization of Korean

text: Phonetic changes between syllables in given names are not transcribed: → "Jeong Seokmin" or "Jeong Seok-min", → "Choe Bitna" or "Choe Bit-na".


title: Revised Romanization of Korean

text: Phonological changes are reflected where , , and are adjacent to : → "joko", → "nota", → "japyeo", 낳지 → "nachi". However, aspirated sounds are not reflected in case of nouns where follows , and : → "Mukho", → "Jiphyeonjeon".


title: Sniper (film series)

text: Sniper is a series of action and war films beginning with the 1993 film "Sniper", which center upon the characters of Master Gunnery Sergeant Thomas Beckett (Tom Berenger) and Gunnery Sergeant Brandon Beckett (Chad Michael Collins), who work as Force Reconnaissance Scout Snipers in the United States Marine Corps.


title: Sniper (film series)

text: Master Gunnery Sergeant Thomas Beckett, an experienced sniper, and Richard Miller are sent on a mission to assassinate a Panamanian General.


title: Sniper (film series)

text: Thomas Beckett and Jake Cole are tasked with assassinating a Serbian general responsible for ethnic cleansing attacks.


title: Sniper (film series)

text: Sniper Thomas Beckett is hired by NSA officials William Avery and Richard Addis to perform a covert operation to eliminate a suspected terrorist kingpin in the People's Republic of Vietnam who was providing support for Jemaah Islamiyah.


title: Sniper (film series)

text: With the assistance of Richard Miller, Marine Sergeant Brandon Beckett, son of Thomas Beckett, takes up the mantle set by his father and goes on a mission of his own.


title: Sniper (film series)

text: After military leaders are assassinated, Gunnery Sergeant Brandon Beckett receives word that his father is one. Attempting to track down the assassin, Brandon finds out that his father is not dead, realizing that he is being used as bait.


title: Sniper (film series)

text: Gunnery Sergeant Brandon Beckett is given yet another mission where he is tasked with protecting a Georgian gas pipeline from Arab sponsored terrorists, however, things become complicated when a professional terrorist sniper named Ravshan Gazakov enters the fray.


title: Sniper (film series)

text: Master Sergeant Brandon Beckett is tasked with protecting a DEA agent from a drug cartel sniper, known as "The Devil".


title: Sniper (film series)

text: Legendary sniper Thomas Beckett and his son, Special Ops Sniper Brandon Beckett, are on the run from the CIA, Russian Mercenaries, and a Yakuza-trained assassin with sniper skills that rival both legendary sharp shooters.


title: Sniper (film series)

text: After discovering a human sex trafficking ring working with a corrupt agent, Brandon Beckett teams up with allies from his past, Agent Zeke "Zero Rosenberg" and Yuki "Lady Death" Mifune, to discover the identity of the agent and stop the ring.


title: Sniper (film series)

text: On August 15, 2022, an interview with Chad Michael Collins confirmed that a tenth "Sniper" film was in the works and was scheduled to begin production in September 2022.


title: Pay It Forward (film)

text: Pay It Forward is a 2000 American romantic drama film directed by Mimi Leder. The film is based loosely on the novel of the same name by Catherine Ryan Hyde. It is set in Las Vegas, and it chronicles 11- to 12-year-old Trevor McKinney's launch of a goodwill movement known as "pay it forward". It stars Haley Joel Osment as Trevor, Helen Hunt as his alcoholic single mother Arlene McKinney, and Kevin Spacey as his physically and emotionally scarred social studies teacher Eugene Simonet. The film was released on October 20, 2000 to mixed reviews and grossed $55 million worldwide.


title: Pay It Forward (film)

text: Trevor McKinney begins 7th grade in Las Vegas. His social studies teacher, Eugene Simonet, assigns the class to put into action a plan that will change the world for the better. Trevor calls his plan "pay it forward", which means the recipient of a favor does a favor for three others rather than paying it back. However, it needs to be a favor that the recipient cannot complete themselves. Trevor implements the plan himself, forming a branch of good deeds. His first deed is to let a homeless man named Jerry live in his garage, and Jerry pays the favor forward by doing car repairs for Trevor's mother Arlene, though Jerry later disappoints Trevor by moving out and returning to drug use.


title: Pay It Forward (film)

text: Meanwhile, Arlene confronts Eugene about Trevor's project after discovering Jerry in their house. Trevor then selects Eugene as his next "pay it forward" target and tricks Eugene and Arlene into a romantic dinner date. This also appears to fail, and Trevor and Arlene argue about her love for Ricky, her alcoholic ex-husband, and Arlene slaps Trevor in a fit of anger. Eugene and Arlene are brought together again when Trevor runs away from home, and Arlene asks Eugene to help her find him. After finding Trevor, Arlene begins to pursue Eugene sexually. Eugene has deep burn marks visible on his neck and face, and he initially resists Arlene's overtures out of insecurity. When they finally sleep together, he is seen to have extensive scarring all over his torso. Arlene accepts this and forms an emotional bond with him, but abandons their relationship when Ricky returns, claiming to have quit drinking. Her accepting him angers Eugene, whose mother had a habit of taking his abusive, alcoholic father back. Eugene explains that his scars are the result of his father setting him on fire in a drunken rage. He berates Arlene for being like his mother and warns her of Ricky's potential to abuse Trevor. When Ricky starts drinking again and resumes his abusive behavior, Arlene realizes her mistake and forces Ricky to leave.


title: Pay It Forward (film)

text: Trevor's school assignment marks the beginning of the story's chronology, but the opening scene in the film shows one of the later favors in the "pay it forward" tree, in which a man gives a car to Los Angeles journalist Chris Chandler. As the film proceeds, Chris traces the chain of favors back to its origin as Trevor's school project. After her date with Eugene, Arlene paid Jerry's favor forward by forgiving her own mother, Grace, for her mistakes in raising Arlene, and Grace, who is homeless, helps a gang member escape from the police. The gang member then saves an asthmatic girl's life in a hospital, and the girl's father gives Chris his new car.


title: Pay It Forward (film)

text: Chris finally identifies Trevor as the originator of "pay it forward" and conducts a recorded interview in which Trevor describes his hopes and concerns for the project. Eugene, hearing Trevor, realizes that he and Arlene should be together. As Eugene and Arlene reconcile with an embrace, Trevor notices his friend Adam being bullied. He pays forward to Adam by rushing into the scene and fighting the bullies while Eugene and Arlene rush to stop him. One of the bullies pulls out a switchblade as another one pushes Trevor against him, unintentionally fatally stabbing Trevor in the stomach. Trevor later dies at the hospital at 7:35 PM. This, and the spread of the movement across the country, is being reported in the news; Arlene and Eugene are soon visited by thousands of people, including students from Trevor's school, who have participated in or heard of the "pay it forward" movement by gathering in a vigil to honor him. In the final scene, Jerry talks a suicide jumper off a bridge.


title: Pay It Forward (film)

text: Leslie Dixon adapted the screenplay from the book of the same name by Catherine Ryan Hyde, which was available as an open writing assignment. Dixon struggled with the adaptation of the book in part because of multiple narrative voices within it. Specifically, the reporter, the central character in the film, does not show up until halfway through the novel. Stuck, Dixon considered returning the money she was paid for the assignment. She eventually hit upon the idea to start with the reporter and trace the events backward. Dixon presented the idea to Hyde who in turn liked it so much that she decided to change the then unpublished novel's plot structure to mirror the film's. In the novel, the character of Eugene Simonet was originally an African-American man named Reuben St. Clair. The role was offered to Denzel Washington, but he turned it down the role to do "Remember the Titans" instead. Kevin Spacey was contacted next and accepted the role of Eugene Simonet.


title: Pay It Forward (film)

text: Though the book is set in Tucson, Arizona, the film production changed the setting to Las Vegas, Nevada, to “show Las Vegas life off the Strip.” Filming took place between February and April 2000 in Las Vegas and in studio in Los Angeles, California, with additional shooting (for the bridge scene) taking place in Portland, Oregon.


title: Pay It Forward (film)

text: The film's soundtrack was composed by Thomas Newman and was released by Varèse Sarabande on October 31, 2000. The soundtrack generally was praised by critics, and is considered to be fitting with the theme of the film.


title: Pay It Forward (film)

text: In addition, the song "Calling All Angels" by Jane Siberry is played in the film and is included on the soundtrack.


title: Pay It Forward (film)

text: The film opened at #4 in the North American box office making $9,631,359 million USD in its opening weekend, behind "Remember the Titans", "Bedazzled" and "Meet the Parents", which was on its third week of release at the number one spot.


title: Pay It Forward (film)

text: On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval score of 39% based on 130 reviews, with an average rating of 5.10/10. The consensus reads, ""Pay It Forward" has strong performances from Spacey, Hunt, and Osment, but the movie itself is too emotionally manipulative and the ending is bad." On Metacritic, the film has a score of 40 out of 100 based on reviews from 34 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A" on an A+ to F scale.


title: Pay It Forward (film)

text: Roger Ebert of the "Chicago Sun-Times" gave the film two and a half out of four stars, stating "With a cleaner story line, the basic idea could have been free to deliver. As it is, we get a better movie than we might have, because the performances are so good: Spacey as a vulnerable and wounded man, Hunt as a woman no less wounded in her own way, and Osment, once again proving himself the equal of adult actors in the complexity and depth of his performance. I believed in them and cared for them. I wish the movie could have gotten out of their way."


title: Pay It Forward (film)

text: "Entertainment Weekly"'s Lisa Schwarzbaum gave it a "D" grade, calling it "reprehensible" for using "shameless cliches of emotional and physical damage" and then "blackmailing audiences into joining the let's-be-nice 'movement'" in order to be transparent Oscar bait.


title: Linda Hogan (TV personality)

text: Linda Marie Claridge (born August 24, 1959), also known as Linda Hogan, is an American television personality who is the ex-wife of professional wrestler Hulk Hogan. She is best known for her role on the American reality television show "Hogan Knows Best".


title: Linda Hogan (TV personality)

text: Claridge was raised Catholic and is of American, Australian, British and Irish descent. She is the older sister of actress Christie Claridge. In 1977, she graduated from Chatsworth High School in California. She was a winning contestant on "Match Game" in 1978.


title: Linda Hogan (TV personality)

text: In 1995, Claridge appeared on Hulk Hogan's album "Hulk Rules", where she sang back-up vocals along with The Wrestling Boot Band. Claridge entered the spotlight in 2005 as "Linda Hogan", due to the VH1 reality show "Hogan Knows Best". A 2005 documentary DVD on street racers, called "Vehicular Lunatics", includes a segment with Claridge. Claridge wrote a book, "Wrestling the Hulk: My Life Against the Ropes", which was published in 2011. She appeared on the Season 3, episode 8 of "Bar Rescue".


title: Linda Hogan (TV personality)

text: Claridge met Terry Bollea a.k.a. Hulk Hogan in a restaurant in Los Angeles. For nearly two years, the couple had a long-distance relationship mostly over the telephone. They married in 1983 in a wedding attended by André the Giant, Vince McMahon, and other wrestling personalities. They have two children together, Brooke (1988) and Nick (1990). Claridge filed for divorce from Hulk Hogan on November 20, 2007. The divorce was finalized on July 28, 2009.


title: Linda Hogan (TV personality)

text: Claridge received media attention for her relationship with a much younger man, Charley Hill. Hill proposed to her on an episode of the VH1 reality television show "Couple's Therapy" in 2012. They began dating in 2008, when Claridge was 48 and Hill was 19.


title: Linda Hogan (TV personality)

text: In October 2012, Claridge was arrested in Malibu, California for driving under the influence, with an alcohol level of 0.084. She pleaded guilty to DUI. She was released several hours later after posting bail of $5,000.


title: Ester Dean

text: Esther Renay Dean (born April 15, 1986) is an American singer, songwriter, music producer and actress. Dean has also written songs for many artists, with numerous Top 10 hits, including No. 1 hits for Rihanna and Katy Perry, earning the name "The Song Factory". At the 54th Annual Grammy Awards, Dean was nominated for Album of the Year as a producer on Rihanna's album "Loud". Outside of music, she voiced two of the characters in the fourth film in the "Ice Age" franchise, "", and also wrote a song for the movie, titled "We Are (Family)". Dean made her acting debut in the film "Pitch Perfect" (2012) as Cynthia-Rose Adams, a role she reprised for the sequels, "Pitch Perfect 2" (2015) and "Pitch Perfect 3" (2017).


title: Ester Dean

text: Born in Muskogee, Oklahoma, and raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Ester Dean is the youngest of five children brought up by their single mother Hester, in a low-income household. At a young age Dean learned how to channel her energy into her music, writing and channeling her emotions into songs. Creative writing served as Dean’s self-therapy.


title: Ester Dean

text: Although her time with Tricky was a significant point in her career, Dean eventually parted ways and relocated to Los Angeles, California.


title: Ester Dean

text: Upon relocating to Los Angeles, Dean began to build a name in the songwriting world. She was eventually introduced to Polow da Don, and later signed to Zone 4 Records/Interscope Records.


title: Ester Dean

text: In 2009 Dean released her first single, "Drop It Low", which peaked at number 38 on the US "Billboard Hot 100", becoming her first US Top 40 single.


title: Ester Dean

text: Dean's big break came when she collaborated with super producers Stargate, creating her first number one single, Rihanna’s "Rude Boy". She went on to write "What's My Name", "Where Have You Been" and several other Rihanna hits, as well as Katy Perry's "Firework" and Nicki Minaj’s "Super Bass" and co-writing "Pills n Potions" with Nicki Minaj.


title: Ester Dean

text: In 2012, Dean was named ‘The Song Machine’ in an article by John Seabrook. She has written, and sometimes produced, Top 40 hits for artists including Rihanna, Christina Aguilera, Florence + The Machine, Beyoncé, Drake, Selena Gomez, Mary J. Blige, Kelly Clarkson, Ciara, The Pussycat Dolls, Usher, Kelly Rowland, R. Kelly, Britney Spears, Lil Wayne, and Eurovision Song Contest 2012 winner Loreen.


title: Ester Dean

text: She appeared as Cynthia Rose in "Pitch Perfect", released in 2012, and reprised the role in the sequels "Pitch Perfect 2" (2015) and "Pitch Perfect 3" (2017).


title: Ester Dean

text: She is on the jury panel for "American Song Contest" representing Oklahoma. The competition begins March 21, 2022 on NBC.


title: Ester Dean

text: Dean possesses a mezzo-soprano range. Her vocals were described by "Billboard" as "raw, energetic vocals [that] cover a wide range: from club banger to melodic doo-wop/hip-hop." Dean's vocals have also been described as similar to Rihanna and Nicki Minaj. "The songwriter's voice is pitched dead center between two artists. The first is frequent collaborator Rihanna...the other is Nicki Minaj when she sings."


title: Ester Dean

text: In a 2012 article in "The New Yorker", Dean described her preferred method of songwriting: "I go into the booth and I scream and I sing and I yell, and sometimes it's words but most time [sic] it's not...and I just see when I get this little chill [on her upper arm, below the shoulder] and then I'm, like, 'Yeah, that's the hook.'"


title: Story of O

text: Story of O (, ) is an erotic novel published in 1954 by French author Anne Desclos under the pen name Pauline Réage, and published in French by Jean-Jacques Pauvert.


title: Story of O

text: Desclos did not reveal herself as the author for 40 years after the initial publication. Desclos stated she wrote the novel as a series of love letters to her lover Jean Paulhan, who had admired the work of the Marquis de Sade. The novel shares with the latter themes such as love, dominance, and submission.


title: Story of O

text: "Story of O" is a tale of female submission involving a beautiful Parisian fashion photographer named O, who is taught to be constantly available for oral, vaginal, and anal intercourse, offering herself to any male who belongs to the same secret society as her lover. She is regularly stripped, blindfolded, chained, and whipped; her anus is widened by increasingly large plugs; her labium is pierced and her buttocks are branded.


title: Story of O

text: The story begins when O's lover, René, brings her to the château in Roissy, where she is trained to serve the members of an elite club. After this initial training, as a demonstration of their bond and his generosity, René hands O to his elder stepbrother Sir Stephen, a more severe master. René wants O to learn to serve someone whom she does not love, and someone who does not love her. Over the course of this training, O falls in love with Sir Stephen and believes him to be in love with her as well. During the summer, Sir Stephen sends O to an old mansion in Samois solely inhabited by women for advanced training and body modifications related to submission. There she agrees to receive permanent marks of Sir Stephen's ownership, in the form of a brand and a steel tag hanging from a labia piercing.


title: Story of O

text: Meanwhile René has encouraged O to seduce Jacqueline, a vain fashion model, and lure her to Roissy. Jacqueline is repulsed when she first sees O's chains and scars, although O herself is proud of her condition as a willing slave. But Jacqueline's younger half-sister becomes enamored of O, and begs to be taken to Roissy.


title: Story of O

text: At the climax, O is presented as a sexual slave, nude but for an owl-like mask and a leash attached to her piercing, before a large party of guests who treat her solely as an object. Afterward, she is shared by Sir Stephen and an associate of his who is referred to only as "The Commander".


title: Story of O

text: Some early editions included several different variations of an epilogue which note that Sir Stephen later abandoned O, though there is debate as to whether Desclos intended it to be included in the finished work; in one such version, O is so distraught by the threat of this abandonment that she insists she would rather die and asks for permission to commit suicide, which is granted.


title: Story of O

text: In February 1955, "Story of O" won the French literature prize Prix des Deux Magots, but the French authorities still brought obscenity charges against the publisher. The charges were rejected by the courts, but a publicity ban was imposed for a number of years.


title: Story of O

text: Olympia Press published the first English edition in 1965. Eliot Fremont-Smith (of "The New York Times") called its publication "a significant event".


title: Story of O

text: A critical view of the novel is that it is about, and derives its erotic power from, the ultimate objectification of a woman. The heroine has the shortest possible name. Though this is in fact a shortening of "Odile", it could also stand for "object" or "orifice", an O being a symbolic representation of any "hole". The novel was strongly criticized by many feminists, who felt it glorified the abuse of women. An article by Susan Griffin that appears in "Against Sadomasochism: A Radical Feminist Analysis" (reprinted from Griffin’s book "Pornography and Silence" with an introduction) criticizes the novel; Griffin argues that "Story of O" shows "how a pornographic society turns a woman's heart against herself."


title: Story of O

text: When the film "Story of O" was released, "L'Express" magazine ran a feature on the novel and film. This resulted in "L'Express" being picketed by feminists from the group Mouvement de libération des femmes, who found the novel and film objectionable. Journalist François Chalais also criticized "Story of O", claiming the novel glorified violence; he described the novel as "bringing the Gestapo into the boudoir".


title: Story of O

text: The author used a pen name, then later used another pen name, before finally, just before her death, revealing her true identity. Her lover, Jean Paulhan, wrote the preface as if the author were unknown to him.


title: Story of O

text: According to Geraldine Bedell, "Pauline Réage, the author, was a pseudonym, and many people thought that the book could only have been written by a man. The writer's true identity was not revealed until ten years ago, when, in an interview with John de St. Jorre, a British journalist and sometime foreign correspondent of "The Observer", an impeccably dressed 86-year-old intellectual called Dominique Aury acknowledged that the fantasies of castles, masks and debauchery were hers." According to several other sources, however, Dominique Aury was itself a pseudonym of Anne Desclos, born 23 September 1907 in Rochefort-sur-Mer, France, and deceased 26 April 1998 (at age 90) in Paris.


title: Story of O

text: The Grove Press edition (U.S., 1965) was translated by editor Richard Seaver (who had lived in France for many years) under the pseudonym Sabine d'Estrée.


title: Story of O

text: Jean Paulhan, the author's lover and the person to whom she wrote "Story of O" in the form of love letters, wrote the preface, "Happiness in Slavery". Paulhan admired the Marquis de Sade's work and told Desclos that a woman could not write like Sade. Desclos took this as a challenge and wrote the book. Paulhan was so impressed that he sent it to a publisher. In the preface, he goes out of his way to appear as if he does not know who wrote it. In one part he says, "But from the beginning to end, the story of O is managed rather like some brilliant feat. It reminds you more of a speech than of a mere effusion; of a letter rather than a secret diary. But to whom is the letter addressed? Whom is the speech trying to convince? Whom can we ask? I don't even know who you are. That you are a woman I have little doubt." Paulhan also explains his own belief that the themes in the book depict the true nature of women. At times, the preface (when read with the knowledge of the relationship between Paulhan and the author), seems to be a continuation of the conversation between them.


title: Story of O

text: In an interview Paulhan explained that O, in a religious-like obsession, was seeking the loss of responsibility for her body and mind much like many religious women seek to surrender themselves to the mercy of God. In both cases it is the joy of destruction. Paulhan was also quoted: "To be killed by someone you love strikes me as the epitome of ecstasy". Discussing the ending, Paulhan states, "I too was surprised by the end. And nothing you can say will convince me that it is the real end. That in reality (so to speak) your heroine convinces Sir Stephen to consent to her death."


title: Story of O

text: One critic has seen Paulhan's essay as consistent with other themes in his work, including his interest in erotica, his "mystification" of love and sexual relationships, and a view of women that is arguably sexist.


title: Story of O

text: Emmanuelle Arsan claimed the "Story of O" inspired her to write her own erotic novel "Emmanuelle" (1967).


title: Story of O

text: A sequel to "Story of O", "Retour à Roissy" ("Return to Roissy," but often translated as "Return to the Chateau", "Continuing the Story of O"), was published in 1969 in French, again with Jean-Jacques Pauvert, "éditeur". It was published again in English by Grove Press, Inc., in 1971. It is not known whether this work is by the same author as the original.


title: Story of O

text: The town Samois-sur-Seine is mentioned in "Story of O" as the location of the fictional mansion managed by Anne-Marie, a lesbian dominatrix. In 1978, the name Samois was adopted by a lesbian-feminist BDSM organization based in San Francisco that existed from 1978 to 1983. It was the first lesbian BDSM group in the United States.


title: Story of O

text: In 2007, the National Leather Association International inaugurated awards for excellence in SM/fetish/leather writing. The categories include the Pauline Reage (a pen name of Anne Desclos, author of "Story of O") award for fiction novel.


title: Story of O

text: American experimental director Kenneth Anger made a 20 minute short film version, "l'Histoire d'O", in 1961.


title: Story of O

text: French director Henri-Georges Clouzot wanted to adapt the novel to film for many years, which was eventually done by director Just Jaeckin in 1975 as "Histoire d'O" ("Story of O") produced by Eric Rochat and Gérard Lorin, starring Corinne Cléry and Udo Kier. The film met with far less acclaim than the book. It was banned in the United Kingdom by the British Board of Film Censors until February 2000.


title: Story of O

text: In 1975, American director Gerard Damiano, well known for "Deep Throat" (1972) and "The Devil in Miss Jones" (1973), created the movie "The Story of Joanna", highly influenced by the "Story of O", by combining motifs from one of the book's chapters and from Jean-Paul Sartre's "No Exit".


title: Story of O

text: In 1979, Danish director Lars von Trier made the short movie entitled "Menthe – la bienheureuse", as an homage to "Story of O". His 2005 film "Manderlay" was also inspired by the book, particularly Paulhan's introduction.


title: Story of O

text: Five years later, in 1984, actress Sandra Wey starred as "O" in "Story of O - Chapter 2", written, directed and produced by Eric Rochat.


title: Story of O

text: In 1992, a Brazilian miniseries in 10 episodes entitled "A História de O" starring Claudia Cepeda was written, directed and produced by Eric Rochat, who was the producer of the original 1975 movie.


title: Story of O

text: In 2002, another version of "O" was released, called "The Story of O: Untold Pleasures", with Danielle Ciardi playing the title character.


title: Story of O

text: In 1975, it was adapted for comics by the Italian artist Guido Crepax. Both the original and Crepax's adaptation were parodied for comics in 2007 by Charles Alverson and John Linton Roberson.


title: Story of O

text: "Writer of O", a 2004 documentary film by Pola Rapaport, mixed interviews with re-enactments of certain scenes from the book. In the documentary, the real author of "Story of O", Dominique Aury (actually a pen name of Anne Desclos), talks about the book "A Girl in Love". This book was written about how "Story of O" was written.


title: Story of O

text: A documentary was also made for BBC Radio 4 entitled "The Story of O: The Vice Francaise", presented by Rowan Pelling, former editor of the "Erotic Review", which looked at the history of the book and its author Anne Desclos.


title: Story of O

text: "", a documentary by filmmaker Maya Gallus, featured the final interview with 90-year-old Dominique Aury (a pen name of "Story of O" author Anne Desclos) before she died. In the film, she recounts the extraordinary love story behind "Story of O" and marvels that she has reached such a grand age.


title: Austin Rivers

text: Austin James Rivers (born August 1, 1992) is an American professional basketball player for the Minnesota Timberwolves of the National Basketball Association (NBA). Rivers led Winter Park High School to back-to-back Florida 6A state championships in 2010 and 2011. He also played in the 2011 Nike Hoop Summit for the Team USA, and was a McDonald's All-American.


title: Austin Rivers

text: He was one of the top rated high school basketball players in the class of 2011, being rated as high as No. 1 by Rivals.com. In September 2010, Rivers committed to Duke University. He was drafted with the 10th pick in the NBA draft by the New Orleans Hornets (now Pelicans), playing three seasons there before being traded to the Los Angeles Clippers. After three years with the Clippers, he was traded to the Wizards in June 2018. In December 2018, he joined the Houston Rockets.


title: Austin Rivers

text: On January 16, 2015, Rivers became the first player in NBA history to play for his father, coach Doc Rivers, then-head coach of the Clippers.


title: Austin Rivers

text: In 2010, Rivers led Winter Park High School to the school's first state title in a 76–57 win against Dr. Phillips High School in the 6A state championship. Rivers scored 23 points in the game. In June 2010, Rivers was a part of the gold medal winning team at the FIBA Americas U18 Championship where he set a Team USA record for an U18 event with 35 points against Canada. On August 5, 2010, Rivers was named to the fifth annual Boost Mobile Elite 24 game, where he was named co-MVP after he had 25 points, 4 rebounds and 4 assists.


title: Austin Rivers

text: On September 30, 2010, Rivers committed to Duke University. His commitment was widely covered by ESPN and various other sports networks given his status as the Class of 2011's top recruit. He officially signed with the program on November 16, 2010.


title: Austin Rivers

text: On March 5, 2011, Rivers led Winter Park to back to back Florida 6A state championships with a 52–44 victory over Dr. Phillips High School, in which he had 25 points, 11 rebounds and 4 steals. Rivers was named the 2011 Naismith Prep Player of the Year on March 10, 2011. He was also an All-American and All-State honoree, and played in the 2011 Nike Hoop Summit for Team USA.


title: Austin Rivers

text: As a freshman, Rivers played in Duke's exhibition games in China and Dubai during an international tour in August 2011. In the first game against the China men's national basketball team, Rivers scored 18 points on 8–19 shooting and led Duke to a 77–64 victory. In the second game (also against the Chinese national team), Rivers scored 12 points in a 78–66 victory, making several dunks during the first half. In the final game played in Beijing, Rivers chipped in 11 points as Duke topped the Chinese, 93–78. In his team's 86–66 victory over the Dubai national team, he scored 16 points, including 10 in the second quarter, on an array of impressive drives.


title: Austin Rivers

text: On February 8, 2012, his three-point basket as time expired allowed Duke to overcome an 82–72 deficit with two minutes to play in an 85–84 victory over the University of North Carolina. The victory ended North Carolina's 31 game winning streak at the Dean Smith Center.


title: Austin Rivers

text: On March 16, 2012, Rivers' college career ended in the "Round of 64" of the NCAA tournament, when Duke lost to Lehigh University. Rivers shot 5-14 from the field, while playing 34 minutes. Lehigh led for most of the game, earning their first NCAA Tournament victory.


title: Austin Rivers

text: On March 26, 2012, Rivers declared for the NBA draft, foregoing his final three years of college eligibility.


title: Austin Rivers

text: Rivers was selected by the New Orleans Hornets with the 10th overall pick the 2012 NBA draft. Rivers chose to wear the #25 jersey, the same number his father wore when he was in the NBA. The night before Rivers said, "I want to be like my dad, only better." Joining him as a rookie on the Hornets was Anthony Davis, the first overall pick of the draft. On July 24, 2012, Rivers signed his rookie scale contract with the Hornets. Three days later, Rivers underwent successful surgery to clean up bone spurs in his right ankle.


title: Austin Rivers

text: On October 31, 2012, Rivers made his NBA debut in the Hornets' season opener against the San Antonio Spurs. In 24 minutes as a starter, he scored 7 points on 1-of-9 shooting in a 99–95 loss. On December 14, he scored a then career-high 27 points in a 113–102 loss to the Minnesota Timberwolves. On March 6, 2013, he broke his hand and subsequently required surgery that forced him to miss the remainder of the season. For his rookie season, he averaged 6.2 points on 37% shooting from the field and 33% from three-point range. In April 2013, the Hornets changed their name to the Pelicans.


title: Austin Rivers

text: On October 16, 2013, the Pelicans exercised their third-year team option on Rivers' rookie scale contract, extending the contract through the 2014–15 season. On April 12, 2014, Rivers recorded season-highs in points and rebounds with 20 and 10 respectively in the Pelicans' 111–104 loss to the Houston Rockets.


title: Austin Rivers

text: On October 24, 2014, the Pelicans declined to exercise their fourth-year team option on Rivers' rookie scale contract, thereby not extending the contract through the 2015–16 season. On December 20, 2014, he scored a season-high 21 points in a 114–88 loss to the Portland Trail Blazers.


title: Austin Rivers

text: On January 12, 2015, Rivers was traded to the Boston Celtics in a three-team trade involving the Pelicans and the Memphis Grizzlies. Three days later, he joined his father on the Los Angeles Clippers after he was traded in a three-team trade involving the Celtics and the Phoenix Suns. On January 16, Rivers made his debut for the Clippers and became the first son to play for his father in an NBA game. On February 21, Rivers scored a then career-high 28 points in a 129–98 win over the Sacramento Kings. On May 8, he scored a playoff career-high 25 points in the Clippers' 124–99 victory that gave them a 2–1 lead in the Western Conference semi-finals against the Houston Rockets.


title: Austin Rivers

text: On July 13, 2015, Rivers re-signed with the Clippers. On February 6, 2016, he was ruled out for four to six weeks with a broken left hand. On March 31, he scored a career-high 32 points in a 119–117 loss to the Oklahoma City Thunder. On April 29, Rivers recorded 21 points and eight assists against the Portland Trail Blazers in Game 6 of their first-round playoff series. However, with a 106–103 loss, the Clippers were eliminated from the playoffs. In the game, Rivers required 11 stitches above his left eye from a collision in the first quarter.


title: Austin Rivers

text: On July 8, 2016, Rivers again re-signed with the Clippers. On December 14, 2016, he scored a season-high 25 points on 7-of-10 from three-point range and 9-of-12 from the field in a 113–108 win over the Orlando Magic. On January 4, 2017, he set a new season high with 28 points in a 115–106 win over the Memphis Grizzlies. He averaged career highs of 12.0 points, 2.2 rebounds and 2.8 assists during the 2016–17 regular season, but due to a strained left hamstring, Rivers missed the last six games of the regular season and the first four games of the playoffs before returning in Game 5 of the Clippers' first-round playoff series against the Utah Jazz.


title: Austin Rivers

text: On December 3, 2017, Rivers scored a season-high 30 points in a 112–106 loss to the Minnesota Timberwolves. On December 22, 2017, he scored 30 of his career-high 36 points in the second half of the Clippers' 128–118 win over the Houston Rockets. The following night, he set a new career high with 38 points in a 115–112 loss to the Memphis Grizzlies. Rivers missed 18 games between late December and early February with a heel bruise.


title: Austin Rivers

text: On June 26, 2018, Rivers was traded to the Washington Wizards in exchange for Marcin Gortat. On December 17, 2018, Rivers was traded with Kelly Oubre Jr. to the Phoenix Suns for Trevor Ariza. Rivers was waived by the Suns the following day.


title: Austin Rivers

text: On December 24, 2018, Rivers signed with the Houston Rockets. On January 5, 2019, he scored a season-high 21 points in a 110–101 loss to the Portland Trail Blazers. On April 7, in a 149–113 blowout win against the Phoenix Suns, Rivers made the 27th three-pointer of the game with 1:09 left on the clock in the fourth quarter, beating the Rockets’ own previous record of most made threes by one team in a game (26). He appeared in 47 games while averaging 8.7 points, 2.3 assists and 1.9 rebounds in 28.6 minutes per game. The Rockets won 72% of their games after signing Rivers. He started 13 straight games as a Rocket from Dec. 31 through Jan. 25, averaging 11.6 points, 3.8 assists and 2.7 rebounds in 38.1 minutes per game. Houston was 15–5 when Rivers scored in double-figures and 9–1 when he recorded at least four assists. He also had nearly as many steals (29) as turnovers (32) with the Rockets. On August 9, 2020, Rivers scored a career-high 41 points off the bench and the Rockets used a big third quarter to pull away and cruise to a 129-112 victory over the Sacramento Kings in the Orlando bubble. Rivers made six 3-pointers as Houston improved to 4-1 at Disney on a night the Rockets played a second straight game without Russell Westbrook, who had a bruised right quadriceps.


title: Austin Rivers

text: On November 27, 2020, Rivers was acquired by the New York Knicks via a sign-and-trade deal. On March 25, 2021, Rivers was traded to the Oklahoma City Thunder in a three team trade and was waived three days later.


title: Austin Rivers

text: On April 20, 2021, the Denver Nuggets signed Rivers to a 10-day contract following a season ending injury sustained by Jamal Murray. Ten days later, he was signed for the rest of the season.


title: Austin Rivers

text: Rivers was born in Santa Monica, California, the son of (current) Philadelphia 76ers head coach Doc Rivers and Kristen Rivers (née Campion). Doc Rivers was a former player who had joined the Los Angeles Clippers the summer of his son’s birth. His older brother, Jeremiah, played basketball for Georgetown and Indiana and later joined the Maine Red Claws, while his older sister Callie played volleyball for the University of Florida and is married to his former Duke teammate Seth Curry. His younger brother, Spencer, was a guard who played for UC Irvine from 2014-19.


title: Austin Rivers

text: He was named Austin after former Cleveland Cavaliers guard Austin Carr, while his middle name, James, is in honor of his great-uncle Jim Brewer.