Иван Самохвалов

Ideas for a film about the Schindlerjuden (Schindler Jews) were proposed as early as 1963. Poldek Pfefferberg, one of the Schindlerjuden, made it his life's mission to tell Schindler's story. Spielberg became interested when executive Sidney Sheinberg sent him a book review of Schindler's Ark. Universal Pictures bought the rights to the novel, but Spielberg, unsure if he was ready to make a film about the Holocaust, tried to pass the project to several directors before deciding to direct it.

Principal photography took place in Kraków, Poland, over 72 days in 1993. Spielberg shot in black and white and approached the film as a documentary. Cinematographer Janusz Kamiński wanted to create a sense of timelessness. John Williams composed the score, and violinist Itzhak Perlman performed the main theme.

Schindler's List premiered on November 30, 1993, in Washington, D.C. and was released on December 15, 1993, in the United States. Often listed among the greatest films ever made,[4][5][6][7] the film received universal critical acclaim for its tone, acting (especially Fiennes, Kingsley, and Neeson), atmosphere, and Spielberg's direction; it was also a box office success, earning $322 million worldwide on a $22 million budget. It was nominated for twelve Academy Awards, and won seven, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Original Score. The film won numerous other awards, including seven BAFTAs and three Golden Globe Awards. In 2007, the American Film Institute ranked Schindler's List 8th on its list of the 100 best American films of all time. The film was designated as "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant" by the Library of Congress in 2004 and selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry.

Plot

In Kraków during World War II, the Nazi Germans force local Polish Jews into the overcrowded Kraków Ghetto. Oskar Schindler, a German member of the Nazi Party from Czechoslovakia, arrives in the city, hoping to make his fortune. Schindler bribes Wehrmacht (German armed forces) and SS officials, acquiring a factory to produce enamelware. Schindler hires Itzhak Stern, a Jewish official with contacts among black marketeers and the Jewish business community; he handles administration and helps Schindler arrange financing. Stern ensures that as many Jewish workers as possible are deemed essential to the German war effort to prevent them from being taken by the SS to concentration camps or killed. Meanwhile, Schindler maintains friendly relations with the Nazis and enjoys wealth and status as "Herr Direktor".

SS-Untersturmführer (second lieutenant) Amon Göth arrives in Kraków to oversee construction of the Płaszów concentration camp. When the camp is ready, he orders the ghetto liquidated: two thousand Jews are transported to Płaszów, and two thousand others are killed in the streets by the SS. Schindler witnesses the massacre and is profoundly affected. He particularly notices a young girl in a red coat who hides from the Nazis and later sees her body on a wagonload of corpses. Schindler is careful to maintain his friendship with Göth and continues to enjoy SS support, mostly through bribery. Göth brutalizes his Jewish maid Helen Hirsch and randomly shoots people from the balcony of his villa; the prisoners are in constant fear for their lives. As time passes, Schindler's focus shifts from making money to trying to save as many lives as possible. To better protect his workers, Schindler bribes Göth into allowing him to build a sub-camp.

As the Germans begin losing the war, Göth is ordered to ship the remaining Jews at Płaszów to Auschwitz concentration camp. Schindler asks Göth for permission to move his workers to a munitions factory he plans to build in Brünnlitz near his home town of Zwittau. Göth reluctantly agrees, but charges a huge bribe. Schindler and Stern create "Schindler's List" – a list of 850 people to be transferred to Brünnlitz instead of Auschwitz.

As the Jewish workers are transported by train to Brünnlitz, the women and girls are mistakenly redirected to Auschwitz-Birkenau; Schindler bribes Rudolf Höss, commandant of Auschwitz, for their release. At the new factory, Schindler forbids the SS guards from entering the factory floor without permission and encourages the Jews to observe the Jewish Sabbath. Over the next seven months, he spends his fortune bribing Nazi officials and buying shell casings from other companies. Due to Schindler's machinations, the factory does not produce any usable armaments. Schindler runs out of money in 1945, just as Germany surrenders.

As a Nazi Party member and war profiteer, Schindler must flee the advancing Red Army to avoid capture. The SS guards in Schindler's factory have been ordered to kill the Jewish workforce, but Schindler persuades them to "return to [their] families as men, instead of murderers". Bidding farewell to his workers, he prepares to head west, hoping to surrender to the Americans. The workers give him a signed statement attesting to his role in saving Jewish lives and present him with a ring engraved with a Talmudic quotation: "Whoever saves one life saves the world entire". Schindler is both touched and ashamed, feeling he should have done more. He breaks down in tears and is comforted by the workers before he and his wife leave in their car. When the Schindlerjuden awaken the next morning, a Soviet soldier announces that they have been liberated. The Jews then walk to a nearby town.

An epilogue reveals that Göth was executed via hanging, and Schindler had failed in both busine

Cast

Liam Neeson plays Oskar Schindler in the film.

Liam Neeson as Oskar Schindler

Ben Kingsley as Itzhak Stern

Ralph Fiennes as Amon Göth

Caroline Goodall as Emilie Schindler

Jonathan Sagall as Poldek Pfefferberg

Embeth Davidtz as Helen Hirsch

Małgorzata Gebel as Wiktoria Klonowska

Mark Ivanir as Marcel Goldberg

Beatrice Macola as Ingrid

Andrzej Seweryn as Julian Scherner

Friedrich von Thun as Rolf Czurda

Jerzy Nowak as Investor

Norbert Weisser as Albert Hujar

Miri Fabian as Chaja Dresner

Anna Mucha as Danka Dresner

Adi Nitzan as Mila Pfefferberg

Piotr Polk as Leo Rosner

Rami Heuberger as Joseph Bau

Ezra Dagan as Rabbi Menasha Lewartow

Elina Löwensohn as Diana Reiter

Hans-Jörg Assmann as Julius Madritsch

Hans-Michael Rehberg as Rudolf Höß

Daniel Del Ponte as Josef Mengele

August Schmölzer as Dieter Reeder

Ludger Pistor as Josef Leipold[a]

Oliwia Dąbrowska as the Girl in Red

Jan Jurewicz [pl] as a Soviet soldier

Production

Development

Pfefferberg, one of the Schindlerjuden, made it his life's mission to tell the story of his savior. Pfefferberg attempted to produce a biopic of Oskar Schindler with MGM in 1963, with Howard Koch writing, but the deal fell through.[9][10] In 1982, Thomas Keneally published his historical novel Schindler's Ark, which he wrote after a chance meeting with Pfefferberg in Los Angeles in 1980.[11] MCA president Sid Sheinberg sent director Steven Spielberg a New York Times review of the book. Spielberg, astounded by Schindler's story, jokingly asked if it was true. "I was drawn to it because of the paradoxical nature of the character," he said. "What would drive a man like this to suddenly take everything he had earned and put it all in the service of saving these lives?"[12] Spielberg expressed enough interest for Universal Pictures to buy the rights to the novel.[12] At their first meeting in spring 1983, he told Pfefferberg he would start filming in ten years.[13] In the end credits of the film, Pfefferberg is credited as a consultant under the name Leopold Page.[14]

The liquidation of the Kraków Ghetto in March 1943 is the subject of a 15-minute segment of the film.

Spielberg was unsure if he was mature enough to make a film about the Holocaust, and the project remained "on [his] guilty conscience".[13] Spielberg tried to pass the project to director Roman Polanski, but he refused Spielberg's offer. Polanski's mother was killed at Auschwitz, and he had lived in and survived the Kraków Ghetto.[13] Polanski eventually directed his own Holocaust drama The Pianist (2002). Spielberg also offered the film to Sydney Pollack and Martin Scorsese, who was attached to direct Schindler's List in 1988. However, Spielberg was unsure of letting Scorsese direct the film, as "I'd given away a chance to do something for my children and family about the Holocaust."[15] Spielberg offered him the chance to direct the 1991 remake of Cape Fear instead.[16] Billy Wilder expressed an interest in directing the film as a memorial to his family, most of whom were murdered in the Holocaust.[17] Brian De Palma also refused an offer to direct.[18]

Spielberg finally decided to take on the project when he noticed that Holocaust deniers were being given serious consideration by the media. With the rise of neo-Nazism after the fall of the Berlin Wall, he worried that people were too accepting of intolerance, as they were in the 1930s.[17] Sid Sheinberg greenlit the film on condition that Spielberg made Jurassic Park first. Spielberg later said, "He knew that once I had directed Schindler I wouldn't be able to do Jurassic Park."[2] The picture was assigned a small budget of $22 million, as Holocaust films are not usually profitable.[19][2] Spielberg forwent a salary for the film, calling it "blood money",[2] and believed it would fail.[2]

In 1983, Keneally was hired to adapt his book, and he turned in a 220-page script. His adaptation focused on Schindler's numerous relationships, and Keneally admitted he did not compress the story enough. Spielberg hired Kurt Luedtke, who had adapted the screenplay of Out of Africa, to write the next draft. Luedtke gave up almost four years later, as he found Schindler's change of heart too unbelievable.[15] During his time as director, Scorsese hired Steven Zaillian to write a script. When he was handed back the project, Spielberg found Zaillian's 115-page draft too short, and asked him to extend it to 195 pages. Spielberg wanted more focus on the Jews in the story, and he wanted Schindler's transition to be gradual and ambiguous instead of a sudden breakthrough or epiphany. He also extended the ghetto liquidation sequence, as he "felt very strongly that the sequence had to be almost unwatchable."[15]

Casting

Neeson auditioned as Schindler early on, and was cast in December 1992, after Spielberg saw him perform in Anna Christie on Broadway.[20] Warren Beatty participated in a script reading, but Spielberg was concerned that he could not disguise his accent and that he would bring "movie star baggage".[21] Kevin Costner and Mel Gibson expressed interest in portraying Schindler, but Spielberg preferred to cast the relatively unknown Neeson, so the actor's star quality would not overpower the character.[22] Neeson felt Schindler enjoyed outsmarting the Nazis, who regarded him as somewhat naïve. "They don't quite take him seriously, and he used that to full effect."[23] To help him prepare for the role, Spielberg showed Neeson film clips of Time Warner CEO Steve Ross, who had a charisma that Spielberg compared to Schindler's.[24] He also located a tape of Schindler speaking, which Neeson studied to learn the correct intonations and pitch.[25]

Fiennes was cast as Amon Göth after Spielberg viewed his performances in A Dangerous Man: Lawrence After Arabia and Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights. Spielberg said of Fiennes' audition that "I saw sexual evil. It is all about subtlety: there were moments of kindness that would move across his eyes and then instantly run cold."[26] Fiennes put on 28 pounds (13 kg) to play the role. He watched historic newsreels and talked to Holocaust survivors who knew Göth. In portraying him, Fiennes said "I got close to his pain. Inside him is a fractured, miserable human being. I feel split about him, sorry for him. He's like some dirty, battered doll I was given and that I came to feel peculiarly attached to."[26] Doctors Samuel J. Leistedt and Paul Linkowski of the Université libre de Bruxelles describe Göth's character in the film as a classic psychopath.[27] Fiennes looked so much like Göth in costume that when Mila Pfefferberg met him, she trembled with fear.[26]

The character of Itzhak Stern (played by Ben Kingsley) is a composite of the accountant Stern, factory manager Abraham Bankier, and Göth's personal secretary, Mietek Pemper.[28] The character serves as Schindler's alter ego and conscience.[29] Dustin Hoffman was offered the role but he refused it.[30][31]

Overall, there are 126 speaking parts in the film. Thousands of extras were hired during filming.[15] Spielberg cast Israeli and Polish actors specially chosen for their Eastern European appearance.[32] Many of the German actors were reluctant to don the SS uniform, but some of them later thanked Spielberg for the cathartic experience of performing in the movie.[21] Halfway through the shoot, Spielberg conceived the epilogue, where 128 survivors pay their respects at Schindler's grave in Jerusalem. The producers scrambled to find the Schindlerjuden and fly them in to film the scene.[15]

Filming

Principal photography began on March 1, 1993 in Kraków, Poland, with a planned schedule of 75 days.[33] The crew shot at or near the actual locations, though the Płaszów camp had to be reconstructed in a nearby abandoned quarry, as modern high rise apartments were visible from the site of the original camp.[34][35] Interior shots of the enamelware factory in Kraków were filmed at a similar facility in Olkusz, while exterior shots and the scenes on the factory stairs were filmed at the actual factory.[36] The production received permission from Polish authorities to film on the grounds of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, but objections to filming within the actual death camp were raised by the World Jewish Congress.[37] To avoid filming inside the actual death camp, the film crew constructed a replica of a portion of the camp just outside the entrance of Birkenau.[38]

There were some antisemitic incidents. A woman who encountered Fiennes in his Nazi uniform told him that "the Germans were charming people. They didn't kill anybody who didn't deserve it".[26] Antisemitic symbols were scrawled on billboards near shooting locations,[15] while Kingsley nearly entered a brawl with an elderly German-speaking businessman who insulted Israeli actor Michael Schneider.[39] Nonetheless, Spielberg stated that at Passover, "all the German actors showed up. They put on yarmulkes and opened up Haggadas, and the Israeli actors moved right next to them and began explaining it to them. And this family of actors sat around and race and culture were just left behind."[39]

I was hit in the face with my personal life. My upbringing. My Jewishness. The stories my grandparents told me about the Shoah. And Jewish life came pouring back into my heart. I cried all the time.

— Spielberg on his emotional state during the shoot[40]

Shooting Schindler's List was deeply emotional for Spielberg, as the subject matter forced him to confront elements of his childhood, such as the antisemitism he faced. He was surprised that he did not cry while visiting Auschwitz; instead, he found himself filled with outrage. He was one of many crew members who could not force themselves to watch during the shooting of the scene where aging Jews are forced to run naked while being selected by Nazi doctors to go to Auschwitz.[41] Spielberg commented that he felt more like a reporter than a film maker – he would set up scenes and then watch events unfold, almost as though he were witnessing them rather than creating a movie.[34] Several actresses broke down when filming the shower scene, including one who was born in a concentration camp.[21] Spielberg, his wife Kate Capshaw, and their five children rented a house in suburban Kraków for the duration of filming.[42] He later thanked his wife "for rescuing me ninety-two days in a row ... when things just got too unbearable".[43] Robin Williams called Spielberg to cheer him up, given the profound lack of humor on the set.[43]

Spielberg spent several hours each evening editing Jurassic Park, which was scheduled to premiere in June 1993.[44]

Spielberg occasionally used German and Polish language dialogue to create a sense of realism. He initially considered making the film entirely in those languages, but decided "there's too much safety in reading [subtitles]. It would have been an excuse [for the audience] to take their eyes off the screen and watch something else."[21]

Cinematography

Influenced by the 1985 documentary film Shoah, Spielberg decided not to plan the film with storyboards, and to shoot it like a documentary. Forty percent of the film was shot with handheld cameras, and the modest budget meant the film was shot quickly over seventy-two days.[45] Spielberg felt that this gave the film "a spontaneity, an edge, and it also serves the subject."[46] He filmed without using Steadicams, elevated shots, or zoom lenses, "everything that for me might be considered a safety net."[46] This matured Spielberg, who felt that in the past he had always been paying tribute to directors such as Cecil B. DeMille or David Lean.[39]

Spielberg decided to use black and white to match the feel of documentary footage of the era. Cinematographer Janusz Kamiński compared the effect to German Expressionism and Italian neorealism.[46] Kamiński said that he wanted to give the impression of timelessness to the film, so the audience would "not have a sense of when it was made."[34] Universal chairman Tom Pollock asked him to shoot the film on a color negative, to allow color VHS copies of the film to later be sold, but Spielberg did not want to accidentally "beautify events."[46]

Music

Main article: Schindler's List (soundtrack)

John Williams, who frequently collaborates with Spielberg, composed the score for Schindler's List. The composer was amazed by the film, and felt it would be too challenging. He said to Spielberg, "You need a better composer than I am for this film." Spielberg responded, "I know. But they're all dead!"[47] Itzhak Perlman performs the theme on the violin.[14]

In the scene where the ghetto is being liquidated by the Nazis, the folk song Oyfn Pripetshik (Yiddish: אויפֿן פּריפּעטשיק, 'On the Cooking Stove') is sung by a children's choir. The song was often sung by Spielberg's grandmother, Becky, to her grandchildren.[48] The clarinet solos heard in the film were recorded by Klezmer virtuoso Giora Feidman.[49] Williams won an Academy Award for Best Original Score for Schindler's List, his fifth win.[50] Selections from the score were released on a soundtrack album.[51]

Themes and symbolism

The film explores the theme of good and evil, using as its main protagonist a "good German", a popular characterization in American cinema.[52][17] While Göth is characterized as an almost completely dark and evil person, Schindler gradually evolves from Nazi supporter to rescuer and hero.[53] Thus a second theme of redemption is introduced as Schindler, a disreputable schemer on the edges of respectability, becomes a father figure responsible for saving the lives of more than a thousand people.[54][55]

The girl in red

Schindler sees a girl in red during the liquidation of the Kraków ghetto. The red coat is one of the few instances of color used in this predominantly black and white film.

While the film is shot primarily in black and white, a red coat is used to distinguish a little girl in the scene depicting the liquidation of the Kraków ghetto. Later in the film, Schindler sees her exhumed dead body, recognizable only by the red coat she is still wearing. Spielberg said the scene was intended to symbolize how members of the highest levels of government in the United States knew the Holocaust was occurring, yet did nothing to stop it. "It was as obvious as a little girl wearing a red coat, walking down the street, and yet nothing was done to bomb the German rail lines. Nothing was being done to slow down ... the annihilation of European Jewry," he said. "So that was my message in letting that scene be in color."[56] Andy Patrizio of IGN notes that the point at which Schindler sees the girl's dead body is the point at which he changes, no longer seeing "the ash and soot of burning corpses piling up on his car as just an annoyance."[57] Professor André H. Caron of the Université de Montréal wonders if the red symbolises "innocence, hope or the red blood of the Jewish people being sacrificed in the horror of the Holocaust."[58]

The girl was portrayed by Oliwia Dąbrowska, three years old at the time of filming. Spielberg asked Dąbrowska not to watch the film until she was eighteen, but she watched it when she was eleven, and says she was "horrified".[59] Upon seeing the film again as an adult, she was proud of the role she played.[59] The character is unintentionally similar to Roma Ligocka, who was known in the Kraków Ghetto for her red coat. Ligocka, unlike her fictional counterpart, survived the Holocaust. After the film was released, she wrote and published her own story, The Girl in the Red Coat: A Memoir (2002, in translation).[60] The girl in red may have been inspired by Kraków resident Genya Gitel Chil, according to a 2014 interview of her family members.[61]

Candles

The opening scene features a family observing Shabbat. Spielberg said that "to start the film with the candles being lit ... would be a rich bookend, to start the film with a normal Shabbat service before the juggernaut against the Jews begins."[15] When the color fades out in the film's opening moments, it gives way to a world in which smoke comes to symbolize bodies being burnt at Auschwitz. Only at the end, when Schindler allows his workers to hold Shabbat services, do the images of candle fire regain their warmth. For Spielberg, they represent "just a glint of color, and a glimmer of hope."[15] Sara Horowitz, director of the Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Studies at York University, sees the candles as a symbol for the Jews of Europe, killed and then burned in the crematoria. The two scenes bracket the Nazi era, marking its beginning and end.[62] She points out that normally, the woman of the house lights the Sabbath candles. In the film, it is men who perform this ritual, demonstrating not only the subservient role of women, but also the subservient position of Jewish men in relation to Aryan men, especially Göth and Schindler.[63]

Other symbolism

To Spielberg, the black and white presentation of the film came to represent the Holocaust itself: "The Holocaust was life without light. For me the symbol of life is color. That's why a film about the Holocaust has to be in black-and-white."[64] Robert Gellately notes the film in its entirety can be seen as a metaphor for the Holocaust, with early sporadic violence increasing into a crescendo of death and destruction. He also notes a parallel between the situation of the Jews in the film and the debate in Nazi Germany between making use of the Jews for slave labor or exterminating them outright.[65] Water is seen as giving deliverance by Alan Mintz, Holocaust Studies professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York. He notes its presence in the scene where Schindler arranges for a Holocaust train loaded with victims awaiting transport to be hosed down, and the scene in Auschwitz, where the women are given an actual shower instead of receiving the expected gassing.[66]

Release

Schindler's List opened in theatres on December 15, 1993 in the United States and December 25 in Canada. Its premiere in Germany was on March 1, 1994.[67] Its U.S. network television premiere was on NBC on February 23, 1997. Shown without commercials, it ranked No. 3 for the week with a 20.9/31 rating/share,[68] the highest Nielsen rating for any film since NBC's broadcast of Jurassic Park in May 1995. The film aired on public television in Israel on Holocaust Memorial Day in 1998.[69]

The DVD was released on March 9, 2004 in widescreen and full screen editions, on a double-sided disc with the feature film beginning on side A and continuing on side B. Special features include a documentary introduced by Spielberg.[70] Also released for both formats was a limited edition gift set, which included the widescreen version of the film, Keneally's novel, the film's soundtrack on CD, a senitype, and a photo booklet titled Schindler's List: Images of the Steven Spielberg Film, all housed in a plexiglass case.[71] The laserdisc gift set was a limited edition that included the soundtrack, the original novel, and an exclusive photo booklet.[72] As part of its 20th anniversary, the film was released on Blu-ray Disc on March 5, 2013.[73] The film was digitally remastered in 4K, Dolby Vision and Atmos and was reissued into theaters on December 7, 2018 for its 25th anniversary.[74] The film was released on Ultra HD Blu-ray on December 18, 2018.[75]

Following the success of the film, Spielberg founded the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, a nonprofit organization with the goal of providing an archive for the filmed testimony of as many survivors of the Holocaust as possible, to save their stories. He continues to finance that work.[76] Spielberg used proceeds from the film to finance several related documentaries, including Anne Frank Remembered (1995), The Lost Children of Berlin (1996), and The Last Days (1998).[77]

Reception

Critical response

Schindler's List received acclaim from both film critics and audiences, with Americans such as talk show host Oprah Winfrey and President Bill Clinton urging others to see it.[78][79] World leaders in many countries saw the film, and some met personally with Spielberg.[78][80] On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has received an approval rating of 98% based on 128 reviews, with an average rating of 9.20/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "Schindler's List blends the abject horror of the Holocaust with Steven Spielberg's signature tender humanism to create the director's dramatic masterpiece."[81] Metacritic gave the film a weighted average score of 94 out of 100, based on 26 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".[82] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film a rare average grade of "A+" on an A+ to F scale.[83]

Stephen Schiff of The New Yorker called it the best historical drama about the Holocaust, a film that "will take its place in cultural history and remain there."[84] Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film four stars out of four and described it as Spielberg's best, "brilliantly acted, written, directed, and seen."[85] Ebert named it one of his ten favorite films of 1993.[86] Terrence Rafferty, also with The New Yorker, admired the film's "narrative boldness, visual audacity, and emotional directness." He noted the performances of Neeson, Fiennes, Kingsley, and Davidtz as warranting special praise,[87] and calls the scene in the shower at Auschwitz "the most terrifying sequence ever filmed."[88] In the 2013 edition of his Movie and Video Guide, Leonard Maltin awarded the picture a four-out-of-four-star rating; he described the movie as a "staggering adaptation of Thomas Keneally's best-seller ... with such frenzied pacing that it looks and feels like nothing Hollywood has ever made before ... Spielberg's most intense and personal film to date".[89] James Verniere of the Boston Herald noted the film's restraint and lack of sensationalism, and called it a "major addition to the body of work about the Holocaust."[90] In his review for The New York Review of Books, British critic John Gross said his misgivings that the story would be overly sentimentalized "were altogether misplaced. Spielberg shows a firm moral and emotional grasp of his material. The film is an outstanding achievement."[91] Mintz notes that even the film's harshest critics admire the "visual brilliance" of the fifteen-minute segment depicting the liquidation of the Kraków ghetto. He describes the sequence as "realistic" and "stunning".[92] He points out that the film has done much to increase Holocaust remembrance and awareness as the remaining survivors pass away, severing the last living links with the catastrophe.[93] The film's release in Germany led to widespread discussion about why most Germans did not do more to help.[94]

Criticism of the film also appeared, mostly from academia rather than the popular press.[95] Horowitz points out that much of the Jewish activity seen in the ghetto consists of financial transactions such as lending money, trading on the black market, or hiding wealth, thus perpetuating a stereotypical view of Jewish life.[96] Horowitz notes that while the depiction of women in the film accurately reflects Nazi ideology, the low status of women and the link between violence and sexuality is not explored further.[97] History professor Omer Bartov of Brown University notes that the physically large and strongly drawn characters of Schindler and Göth overshadow the Jewish victims, who are depicted as small, scurrying, and frightened – a mere backdrop to the struggle of good versus evil.[98]

Horowitz points out that the film's dichotomy of absolute good versus absolute evil glosses over the fact that most Holocaust perpetrators were ordinary people; the movie does not explore how the average German rationalized their knowledge of or participation in the Holocaust.[99] Author Jason Epstein commented that the movie gives the false impression that if people were smart enough or lucky enough, they could survive the Holocaust.[100] Spielberg responded to criticism that Schindler's breakdown as he says farewell is too maudlin and even out of character by pointing out that the scene is needed to drive home the sense of loss and to allow the viewer an opportunity to mourn alongside the characters on the screen.[101]

Bartov wrote that the "positively repulsive kitsch of the last two scenes seriously undermines much of the film's previous merits". He describes the humanization of Schindler as "banal", and is critical of what he describes as the "Zionist closure" set to the song "Jerusalem of Gold".[102]

Assessment by other filmmakers

Schindler's List was very well received by many of Spielberg's peers. Filmmaker Billy Wilder wrote to Spielberg saying, "They couldn't have gotten a better man. This movie is absolutely perfection."[17] Polanski, who turned down the chance to direct the film, later commented, "I certainly wouldn't have done as good a job as Spielberg because I couldn't have been as objective as he was."[103] He cited Schindler's List as an influence on his 1995 film Death and the Maiden.[104] The success of Schindler's List led filmmaker Stanley Kubrick to abandon his own Holocaust project, Aryan Papers, which would have been about a Jewish boy and his aunt who survive the war by sneaking through Poland while pretending to be Catholic.[105] According to scriptwriter Frederic Raphael, when he suggested to Kubrick that Schindler's List was a good representation of the Holocaust, Kubrick commented, "Think that's about the Holocaust? That was about success, wasn't it? The Holocaust is about 6 million people who get killed. Schindler's List is about 600 who don't."[105][b]

Filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard accused Spielberg of using the film to make a profit out of a tragedy while Schindler's wife, Emilie Schindler, lived in poverty in Argentina.[107] Keneally disputed claims that she was never paid for her contributions, "not least because I had recently sent Emilie a check myself."[108] He also confirmed with Spielberg's office that payment had been sent from there.[108] Filmmaker Michael Haneke criticized the sequence in which Schindler's women are accidentally sent off to Auschwitz and herded into showers: "There's a scene in that film when we don't know if there's gas or water coming out in the showers in the camp. You can only do something like that with a naive audience like in the United States. It's not an appropriate use of the form. Spielberg meant well – but it was dumb."[109]

The film was criticized by filmmaker and lecturer Claude Lanzmann, director of the nine-hour Holocaust film Shoah, who called Schindler's List a "kitschy melodrama" and a "deformation" of historical truth. "Fiction is a transgression, I am deeply convinced that there is a ban on depiction [of the Holocaust]", he said. Lanzmann also criticized Spielberg for viewing the Holocaust through the eyes of a German, saying "it is the world in reverse." He complained, "I sincerely thought that there was a time before Shoah, and a time after Shoah, and that after Shoah certain things could no longer be done. Spielberg did them anyway."[110]

Reaction of the Jewish community

At a 1994 Village Voice symposium about the film, historian Annette Insdorf described how her mother, a survivor of three concentration camps, felt gratitude that the Holocaust story was finally being told in a major film that would be widely viewed.[111] Hungarian Jewish author Imre Kertész, a Holocaust survivor, feels it is impossible for life in a Nazi concentration camp to be accurately portrayed by anyone who did not experience it first-hand. While commending Spielberg for bringing the story to a wide audience, he found the film's final scene at the graveyard neglected the terrible after-effects of the experience on the survivors and implied that they came through emotionally unscathed.[112] Rabbi Uri D. Herscher found the film an "appealing" and "uplifting" demonstration of humanitarianism.[1] Norbert Friedman noted that, like many Holocaust survivors, he reacted with a feeling of solidarity towards Spielberg of a sort normally reserved for other survivors.[114] Albert L. Lewis, Spielberg's childhood rabbi and teacher, described the movie as "Steven's gift to his mother, to his people, and in a sense to himself. Now he is a full human being."

Box office

The film grossed $96.1 million ($172 million in 2020 dollars) in the United States and Canada and over $321.2 million worldwide. In Germany, the film was viewed by over 100,000 people in its first week alone from 48 screens and was eventually shown in 500 theaters (including 80 paid for by municipal authorities), with a total of six million admissions and a gross of $38 million. Its 25th anniversary showings grossed $551,000 in 1,029 theaters.

Somewhere along the way I seem to have unofficially joined a subculture or memetic ecosystem that I’ve come to think of as The Liminal Web. While there aren’t any hard and fast edges to this international constellation of thinkers and theorists it becomes pretty clear you’ve joined the fray when at least thirty percent of all the intellectual media you consume tends to emerge from this particular noospheric relay.

Here's how it looks in 2D.

A Visual Representation Of The Liminal Web

1.The inner circle represents six of the media platforms which due to their very high crossover of guests helped to cultivate a distinct Liminal Web in the first place.

2.The second circle includes a collection of some of the other podcasts, platforms, communities and organisations that tend to embody a similar ethos and worldview to those explored on the platforms in the centre. However it is by no means an exhaustive representation as there are many others people, platforms and projects who I also see as comprising The Liminal Web. I’ve included a longer list of some of them at the end of the article.

3.The outer circles represent different sub cultures or movements that intersect with the constellation of ideas explored within the The Liminal Web but don’t have quite as much of cross over as the groups in the inner two circles. There is a much greater overlap in some of these (for instance Game B) than others however this isn’t depicted in the image.

So put together the inner two circles represent what I’ve come to loosely define as The Liminal Web which includes not only the content creators and communities that are represented visually but also all of the people who listen to and resonate with this collection of ideas.

Sharing The Subtle Buzz Of Belonging

The Liminal Web is made up of a collection of individuals who often have a long history of feeling as if they don’t wholly belong in any particularly scene or space, as such they tend to hold onto any sense of group identification quite lightly. I myself fall into this category which is why it’s been refreshing to realise that I am more comfortable than usual broadly identifying with this particular subculture. In certain moments it feels as if I might have actually found the closest thing out there to my very own memetic tribe.

So in the name of sharing some of this nascent buzz of Liminal belonging this article is an attempt to describe the contours of the The Liminal Web, trace its lineage, identify its tensions, describe its shortfalls and point towards some of its latent potential. I hope it can serve as an invitation for people unfamiliar with the space to come and check it out whilst also precipitating discussion and perhaps even further cohesion amongst folks already in the scene.

While I’ve attempted to account for as much of my own personal bias as possible its difficult to avoid colouring the overall shape and feeling of the space through the lens of my own preferences, perspective and affiliations. And so a secondary motivation for writing this piece is to compare notes with others in the scene to determine if we are in fact we are all seeing something similar. It’s my hunch that we are. And that from certain angles, it is in fact rather beautiful to behold.

What Exactly Is The Liminal Web?

The Liminal Web is a collection of thinkers, writers, theorists, podcasters, videographers and community builders who all share a high crossover in their collection of perspectives on the world. It not only includes creators of content but also the people and communities who resonate with the constellation of ideas such creators put forward.

Like all scenes it started out as more of a cross section of other pre-existing communities but in the last few years it appears to have formed enough of its own identity to be classified as a discrete network of its own. This same constellation has already been described and defined in a number of different ways including as The Sensemaking Web, The Intellectual Deep Web and The Meta Tribe. My intention is to complement these earlier descriptions with a slightly different interpretation and hopefully produce a richer understanding of what we’re all pointing towards in the process.

Do We Need To Name It? And If So Why ‘Liminal’?

Whenever we name something we run the risk of it then becoming static. Just like with romantic relationships the moment we ‘have the talk’ and decide that we’re a ‘thing’ often some of the magic can instantaneously evaporate, never to return again. But just like with romantic partnerships if we can stay present to the experience then naming something as existing can open us up to whole new depths of relational possibility and that's my intention here.

I settled on the name Liminal because one definition of the word is ‘to occupy a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold’ which for me speaks perfectly to the idea that everyone in the space is in their own unique way attempting to mid-wife a new kind of regenerative culture whilst simultaneously hospicing the old. Jeremy Johnson offers a beautiful interpretation of why the word Liminal is so fitting for our times in this piece from his magazine of the same name. I use the term here lightly with the expectation that the scene will of course continue to evolve, shift and change over time along with the names we use to describe it. That’s what scenes do after all, run one after another in a much larger play.

From Whence The Liminal Web Emerged

I propose The Liminal Web began to crystallise in the wake of a number of podcasts and youtube channels which emerged between 2015 and 2020. Each of these platforms explored a very similar array of topics and platformed a similar collection of guests and in doing so created a distinct network of thinkers and ideas. Here is a brief overview of that period:

2015 - Some of the early pioneers in this regard were Mike Gilliland and Euvie Ivanova who launched The Future Thinkers podcast just before the Brexit vote and election of Donald trump would foreshadow a global wave of right wing nationalist populism.

2018 - A few years later Daniel Thorson launched the Emerge podcast which served to further delineate this diverse and yet somehow deeply interrelated constellation of thinkers. At around the same time David Fuller and Alexander Beiner started Rebel Wisdom taking this same field of ideas to a broader audience through high quality video production on Youtube.

2019 - Next up the Both/And Podcast and The Jim Rutt show both launched covering a similar array topics but each doing so with their own particular flavour and style. It was around this time that it became almost impossible to keep up with all of the content being produced in the space.

2020 - And then just after the pandemic arrived in 2020 Peter Limberg started The Stoa and pioneered a popular new format of group Zoom calls with shorter guest presentations followed by a wider collective Q&A.

While there are a number of other platforms and content creators who were also active and influential during this time I’m naming these six in particular due to the very high crossover in guests they all share. I’ve come to view each of them as critical layers of paint that would come to colour the canvas that has become The Liminal Web. Also formative to the space during this period was Jonathon Rowson and Tomas Bjorkman launching Perspectiva in 2016 and Metamoderna publishing The Listening Society in 2017.

Thinkers In The Space & What Connects Them

If I was given the task of inviting five people to come and speak at an event in the hope of attracting and thrilling as wide a cross section of The Liminal Web community as possible I’d probably suggest (not in any particular order):

Daniel Schmachtenberger

Nora Bateson

Tyson Yunkaporta

John Vervaeke

Hanzi Frienacht

Like all festival line ups this will no doubt cause some degree of contention and will hopefully be fun to argue with your Liminal friends about. However each of these luminaries have all appeared as guests on at least four of the six podcasts that I believe helped to form The Liminal Web in the first place, so there is some level of objectivity informing the selection.

To get a fuller sense of the range of thinkers in the space I've included a list of some of the other folks who have also appeared as guests on a number of podcasts and media platforms within the scene. Some of them include:

Richard Bartlett

Joe Brewer

Zak Stein

Jeremy Johnson

James Erlich

Jamie Wheal

Douglas Rushkoff

Tomas Bjorkman

Ria Baeck

Johnathan Rowson

Layman Pascal

Bonnita Roy

Jordan Hall

Charles Eisenstein

Indra Adnan

Miriam Mason Martineau

Bayo Akomolafe

Alex Ebert

Alexander Bard

Stephen Jenkinson

Jeremy Lent

Samo Burja

Erik Davis

Guy Sengstock

Forrest Landry

Michael Taft

But if I had to choose just one metric for identifying the memetic scope of The Liminal Web it would be the breadth of guest selection on The Stoa. Another useful indicator would be the cross section of people that have attended the various Emerge gatherings in Europe over the last few years.

And while it can be difficult to describe exactly what it is that connects such a diverse array of thinkers together it seems to be less about what people think about things and more to do with how they think about them. Tyler Alterman summed it up well in this series of tweets outlining what he and others have called The Meta Tribe:

‘Metatribe members tend to be multi-hyphenate: artist-scientist; dancer-entrepreneur; programmer-monk. Their work often synthesizes multiple disciplines at once.’

‘The metatribe is neither nihilist nor locked onto an ethical system. It has political opinions without being left, right, or center. These opinions are provisional, nondogmatic, but strongly investigated, so metatribers often appear to be “heterodox”.’

‘Metatribe members tend to be at the center of a Venn diagram with many circles, often dwelling at the edge of many subcultures at once, acting as nodes between them.’

‘The metatribe is scientific without scientism. It is spiritual while being neither new age nor traditionally religious.’

‘Dissatisfied with the partial map of the world from any one subculture or discipline, metatribe members have evolved to fill the spaces in between.’

‘For all this, you might expect metatribe members to be noncommittal to a cause. In reality, they’re more likely to do cause prioritization. Popularly prioritized causes include existential risk and the meaning crisis.’

Liminal Web Discussion Points

To give an idea of what kind of subjects are most often discussed and explored within The Liminal Web here’s a little word cloud I whipped up.

But this list of topics really only speaks to the more surface level exchange of ideas within the scene, as in certain moments there is a much more diaphanous and subtle mode of interpersonal experience which can arise. Such experiences go beyond a simple exchange of procedural knowledge and point towards a new way of being together rather than a way new of doing. They are really quite sublime.

Such occurrences might be visualised as a group of people standing together with their eyes closed quietly facing the night sky, collectively sensing into the stories and sensations waiting there to greet them. This kind of symbolism highlights the fact that one of the central explorations implicit within The Liminal Web is how do we combine the yang of systems change with the yin of interbeing. How do we simultaneously let go of control whilst also growing into our capacities as cultivators of a world more curious and kind.

The Liminal Web Intellectual Lineage

I’d suggest the whole space has been heavily influenced by a number of systems thinkers and synthesisers such as Alfred Korzybski, Buckminster Fuller, Gregory Bateson, Joseph Campbell, Marshall McLuhan, Jean Gebser, Ken Wilber, Joanna Macy, Ursula Le Guin, E.F Schumacher, James Baldwin and Donella Meadows.

Obviously there is a much broader array of philosophers, psychologists, scientists, sociologists, economists and political theorists that have also had formative influences on the scene but I’ve chosen to highlight this more integral stream of influence in recognition of the fact that they have generally attempted to adopt as wide a perspective as possible. They also tend to blend together elements of the exoteric (or systems change) and esoteric (or sense of interiority) within their work which is a way of thinking typical to many in The Liminal Web. But this isn't to suggest that everyone in the space would subscribe to all of the ideas espoused by the names I’ve mentioned, it’s quite a disparate list after all.

A few additional names that I believe are also widely respected within the scene include that of Terrence Mckenna, Aldous Huxley, Carl Jung and Alan Watts. All of whom also specialised in playfully integrating and synthesising vast bodies of knowledge within their work. And finally I feel the book Finite and Infinite Games by James P. Carse deserves a special mention as it is often widely cited as being formative for thinkers in the space.

The Liminal Web Political Spectrum

It’s interesting to consider whether the traditional spectrum of political leftness and rightness manifests in space. While this binary is limited at the best of times when applied to such a complex and idiosyncratic bunch of thinkers it becomes stretched to the very edges of its usefulness. And yet I feel it’s still possible (and kind of fun) to have a go at roughly charting things along a basic Liminal Left to Liminal Centre spectrum.

Alas, I can hear the groans of some of my Liminal chums already, 'How dare you reduce us to a single binary spectrum, I shall not be contained so crudely!' they protest. 'I hear you friends, not even three thousand spectra could ever truly do justice to the exquisite nuance of your mercurial perspectives' I reply.

And yet 'forgive me' I plead, as here I go anyway..

I’ve positioned the platforms and projects along the spectrum based on a kind of average of the Overton Window of the entirety of their content. But take it with a grain of salt as pretty much all of these projects work towards integrating the wisdom inherent in all points of the political spectrum and so often also attempt to mediate between contrasting world views.

I'd suggest that all of the projects on the spectrum below fit into the space identified in the spectrum above.

Points Of Tension & Difference

While there is a broad alignment of values within The Liminal Web like with any group of people there are also distinct cultural tensions, differences of opinion, personality clashes and intellectual disagreements. To its credit I believe people in the space do a better job of respectfully disagreeing (or straight up arguing) with each other than I tend to observe in other subcultures, but there are still many points of tension that remain unresolved.

This is one of the reasons I find analysing the whole Liminal Web so interesting. As while it remains a nebulous, loosely defined and largely online network it still represents the collection of humans I appear to be most aligned with in terms of how we perceive the world and so it provides insight into exactly what levels of harmonised cohesion are currently possible between a wider group of people.

Is it realistic to expect everyone will be able to settle their differences amicably? What degree of conflict and discord is inevitable in any human grouping structure no matter how cognitively attuned? Is it possible to integrate the wide variety of political, spiritual and cultural world views present within the space and cultivate a truly thriving, supportive and multi perspectival network of thinkers and doers?

In some moments I feel that such resonant cohesion already exists (it certainly does in certain pockets of the broader Liminal Web) in other moments I feel as if I’m just projecting my own hopes and dreams upon something that isn’t quite there yet.

One of the more interesting and lively tensions in the space relates to the difference in perspective between a cluster of thinkers I’ve dubbed the Systems Poets and those in the scene more closely aligned with various meta-theories and developmental stage models. From my perspective it seems as if the former tends to view the latter as erring towards being elitist, overly structured and perhaps lacking in the full queerness and organicity required to meaningfully transcend the limits of our current cultural constructs.

While the latter tends to view the former as some how unwilling to engage with what they see as the uncomfortable yet unavoidable truth of pervasive developmental hierarchy and perhaps also as somewhat unable to commit to what they consider to be broader emancipatory meta-narratives. And while it’s tempting for the Systems Poets to cast the Meta-theorists as simply recreating modernity under a new banner and for this to be met with the claim that such a critique is just another example of postmodern limitation, I’m personally of the opinion that neither of these two positions does the other side justice.

I highlight this difference in opinion because I have the sense that there’s an important synthesis to be found between the two and find it interesting to compare these contrasting views as reminiscent of some the underlying differences between the Integral theories of both Jean Gebser and Ken Wilber, though this is by no means a perfect equivalence.

Beyond this particular disagreement if I had to identify some of the more contentious questions amongst thinkers in the space they would include:

What is your perspective on consciousness? Are you a panpsychist, emergentist, animist, idealist or something else entirely?

On balance do you think that developmental stage theories are more useful or harmful?

What is your conception of spirit and soul?

And if we really wanted to spice things up...What’s your take on the recent UFO disclosures and do you believe aliens have already visited us here on Earth?

Liminal Web Shadows & Blindspots

Like everything The Liminal Space comes complete with its own shadow sides and I point to some of them here in the hope that we might better integrate them over time. In different moments I’ve seen each of these elements in how I show up as well, so I consider myself very much a part of the kind of dynamics I'm outlining in this section.

Overly Intellectual & Analytical - Despite speaking to the importance of maintaining a balance between mind, body, heart and soul the space is still often intensely cerebral. This is no surprise really as spending so many hours thinking deeply about so many things and then communicating those ideas to each other through electronic devices tends to leave even the most grounded amongst us feeling somewhat disembodied. Such intensive bouts of thinkings can also serve to distance us from the kinds of stillness and presence which allow for more subtle states of inner experience, which ironically is what a lot of the intellectual discourse is directed towards achieving in the first place.

I would also suggest that as wider scene we are still very much grappling with how to honour and integrate ways of being and knowing that transcend words and rationality altogether. You could frame this archetypally as the ongoing challenge and art form of creating space for and integrating the wisdom of our more feminine/right brain/yin aspects in a culture that is so heavily dominated and shaped by masculine/left brain/yang energy.

Elitism - Many folks in the scene appear to have high IQ’s and EQ’s (or at least we like to think we do and value being seen that way). This means a lot of the ideas and language used to discuss them can be off-putting to people not familiar with all of the jargon. I imagine that for some people outside (and inside) the space it can all just come across as a bunch of smart people routinely validating one another for being so intelligent, sensitive and insightful which naturally wouldn’t come across as all that inviting. I think in certain moments there can also be a subtle sense of competitiveness between people (mostly but not always males) comparing their respective models of the world. There is a further irony here in that often times we are sharing in highly complex, jargon filled and thus relatively exclusive discussions with each other with the express purpose of cultivating a more inclusive and interconnected global culture.

Diversity - The space is still largely populated by WEIRD white men (myself included) and this can lead much of the discourse to have an overly masculine tone and feeling. It’s also mostly made up of people from Europe and North America (with a significant Canadian contingent) and this centres the discourse around Western thought forms and ideas whilst also unintentionally excluding anyone who doesn’t speak English. Ideally over time the space will continue to attract and celebrate an increasingly broad array of thinkers from all sorts of cultures and communities.

Ego - Many of us in the scene have what I would describe as overly inflated or perhaps more accurately relatively unbridled egos. This is not all that surprising considering there are many highly accomplished, successful and well respected individuals involved. However I’ve observed that while there is a lot of rhetoric about cultivating whole new ways of moving through the world there still remain many instances of people (including myself) striving to be right, to be recognised and even to be adored. I’d also lovingly suggest that these all too human motivations are perhaps more active in many of us than is often comfortable to look at and truly own.

Game A-ness - Despite the regenerative values and ethos of those in the space most of the discourse and exchange of ideas still happens within the context of late stage capitalism (or Game A). This means that there are book sales, Youtube views, new followers, course sales and newsletter subscriptions constantly being strived for even if such metrics aren’t the central intent of the creators. This is especially true for people making a living from producing content in the space and it brings with it a subtle ambience of commercialisation. Naturally until we shift into a wholly new socio-economic paradigm this is almost impossible to avoid and yet I feel it’s something worth keeping an eye on. How do we avoid succumbing to the temptation of focusing on what’s popular and profitable versus what is most important and necessary for us to consider as a culture?

It Can All Get A Bit Gloomy - With so much focus on The Meta-Crisis it’s no surprise that the general mood in the wider Liminal Web can sometimes feel a little forlorn. While I find it endlessly inspiring how willing people are to take on such a high degree of personal responsibility for the existential risks we face as a species, there really is only so much each of us can handle before we start to feel deflated and numb. For this reason I feel it’s important we all keep celebrating one another as often as possible and relish in the joy of just being in each others company whenever we can.

Some Common Challenges

There seems to be a number of fairly common challenges experienced by folks in the The Liminal Web. I certainly struggle with each of these at various moments along the way as well. Some of them include:

An often subconscious belief that everything we do needs to be directed towards helping save the world. Over time this can sap the joy out of life as we begin to lose touch with our relaxation response and our art, creativity and even our relationships can begin to feel more like means rather than ends.

A deep loneliness from feeling as we’ve never totally fitted in despite often getting on well with people and having meaningful friendships. I’d describe this as a feeling (which may or may not be grounded in truth) that we have not often (or ever) been held or appreciated in our totality. As Jung put it ‘if a man knows more than others [or thinks he does] he becomes lonely.’

Many of us appear to grapple with the question of how to make money without sacrificing our souls. And if we’re not able to earn a living directly contributing to the change we wish to see in the world we’re then presented with the challenge of keeping enough energy after our paid hours of employment to then work on our passion projects, cultivate meaningful relationships and still squeeze in time for some good old fashioned fun.

There seems to be a relatively high occurrence of anxiety, depression and existential malaise experienced by people in the space. My sense is this relates to the fact that most people have the capacity to think very deeply about things and can thus tie themselves in highly complex cerebral knots.

A more lighthearted but still prevalent challenge in the space is a sense book, podcast and interview overwhelm. There is a constant flow of amazing material emerging from the space and simply not enough time to consume it all. This can lead to sense of FOMO and be surprisingly stressful in its own way.

We’ve Found The Others, Now What..

So now that we’ve found each other, what's next? The simplest option would be to just carry on cross pollinating one another with our creative output and (mostly) long distance friendships, all the while meeting up every now and again at regional and international Liminal-ish events. While this sounds pretty good to me I can’t help but also imagine some altogether more fantastic possibilities..

The Sensemaking Collectives

One trajectory of evolution within the space has been the development of what can loosely be described as Sense Making Collectives. These are projects or platforms that:

A. Release some kind of Liminal media (podcasts, interviews, films etc.).

B. Attract and cultivate an online community around this content.

C. Start to interact more deeply online before connecting up and collaborating in person.

The clearest example of this is probably Future Thinkers which started out as a podcast, grew into a fully fledged online community and is now developing their own Smart Village. Rebel Wisdom have also followed along a similar trajectory. Along side building a strong following around their films they have developed an ecosystem of online and in person discussions, workshops and courses that can allow people to become more fully engaged.

The Stoa has also attracted a loose ecology of people around its sessions and some of its founding members are currently experimenting with the process of forming Digital Gangs, there are also plans afoot to open a philosophical coffee-house for The Stoa to call home in Toronto.

One of the newer and most dynamic additions to the wider scene is Denizen (formerly Dent) which first grew out of Clubhouse and is now evolving into a media platform and in person Collective spanning the United States and beyond. They are particularly interesting in that they are actively prioritising the cultivation of community and moving towards a more co-created culture.

Meanwhile in Europe Perspectiva continues to host gatherings and weave ever more meaningful bonds between the people in its network. Metamoderna have just started offering online courses will soon be holding immersive retreats and have a vision of one day establishing Metamodern monasteries. Life Itself already have a series of residential hubs and the Monastic Academy continue to open centres across North America. While in Canada the team behind the Integral Leadership Review is planning a full scale Ecovillage.

So there is a clear trend of digital communities forming around a constellation of ideas before gradually coalescing into more physical collectives complete with in person events and locations.

And these are just the projects I’m familiar with. I’m sure there are a number of other communities and eco villages in the broader pipeline as well. I know that folks in the Game B space have been getting closer to manifesting some of their Proto-B ideas and that James Erlich has a whole host of amazing communal developments on the horizon. There's also Richard Bartlett, Natalia Lombardo and Michel Bachmann who are all seasoned community cultivators actively weaving new threads of microsolidarity across the European continent.

There are also Nora Bateson's Warm Data labs and John Vervaeke's and Guy Sengstock's Dialectic Dialogos events which are both prototyping new ways of interrelating that go far beyond just a surface level exchange of information. And in New Zealand Enspiral (perhaps just adjacent to The Liminal Web with some meaningful overlap) continues to pioneer what is possible within the context of an established mutual aid community and cooperative network. The Terran Collective are doing similar things in The Bay Area.

What were once largely memetic tribes are becoming increasingly embodied. We seem to be gravitating towards each other in ever more meaningful ways and creating new kinds of digital and physical culture in the process. This is for me the true potential of The Liminal Web, to cultivate whole new ecosystems of human relationship that are grounded in wisdom, kindness and playful presence.

And while I feel the continued evolution of these Sensemaking collectives holds huge potential for our inner and outer transformation I’m also acutely aware that community building is a highly complex and deceptively time consuming task. So I’m interested to see how each of these projects unfolds over time and I'm curious to explore how we can can offer support to those at the centre of each of these communal nodes. After all, it’s a lot to expect of people to both run media creation platforms and also hold space for healthy and resilient communities to unfurl.

Liminal Visions

There are a number of other ways I’d personally love to see The Liminal Web evolve over time:

Online Liminal Community - I think there is potential for a much more cohesive online Liminal Web experience. Right there now there are small pockets of coherence to be found in various Discord groups, Email lists, Facebook groups and in private groups on platforms such as Mighty Networks and Circles. But at some point along side these more cosy and idiosyncratic corners of the dark forests of the Liminal Web I would like to see a more widely shared online platform experience that connects up many of the different streams within the broader scene and allows for greater cross pollination between them. More often than not social media groups tend to devolve to the lowest common denominator, but if curated with care I've found they can serve as profoundly potent containers for asynchronous communal bonding.

If we could gather the few thousand people in the Liminal network together on a new kind of blockchain based social media platform that protected everyones privacy and data, then I believe much magic could ensue. Especially if there were paid administrators actively cultivating a more intimate and conscious experience that went far beyond the posting of hot takes and memes (as fun as this can be).

Such a platform could also serve as a watering hole where Liminal-ish folks could connect with each other form into smaller Pods and partake in peer to peer process groups (coaching, circling, co-therapy etc.). And as shared virtual reality spaces become more prevalent in the years ahead this kind of platform could also provide the means to hold international festivals in the digital space and even develop whole new kinds of digital villages online. Though it goes without saying the second order impacts of so deeply engaging with such technology should be carefully considered and always serve to augment rather than wholly replace any in person equivalents.

In Person Liminal Collectives & Villages - I hope to one day find myself living along side a whole host of other folks with similarly Liminal inclinations. I wrote a book about what is possible if you can gather between 25 and 200 people together in the same town or city and form a Collective. And of course developing a full scale smart village together is always a possibility as well. If the right project were to emerge I would be willing to move around the world to make this happen so I am watching closely to see how the various settlements already in the pipeline unfold over time.

Southern Liminal - I’d like to see an equivalent of Denizen, Rebel Wisdom or The Stoa emerge in the Asia Pacific and better cater to the time zones for those of us living in the south. Having a local network of sensemakers across Australia, New Zealand and Asia would be a wonderful thing.

A Liminal Movement - And finally, while I'm dreaming, over time I’d like to see a broader movement coalesce around Liminal ideals and start to influence the political landscape by applying the kinds of ideas found in the work of Indra Adnan and Hanzi Frienacht. And if I was to get really wild for a moment I could even one day envisage the formation of a kind of Solarpunk inspired, blockchain based progressive equivalent of a Liminal Network State, but such ideas are probably best left for when I finally get around to writing a Solar Punk Science Fiction novel.

In Conclusion: Some Liminal Gratitude

But for now I’m just deeply grateful to find myself in the gentle orbit of such an inspiring and multifaceted collection of people. There are so many incredible humans in this wider network and I’m humbled and honoured to find myself in conversation with so many of them. As it stands there’s a very broad array of world views and philosophies in the space and I hope the tensions between these various perspectives don't end up driving people too far apart.

Through my experiences in weaving community I’ve been lucky enough to have a felt sense of what it’s like to create culture with a group of people with whom you resonate deeply. It's one of the most precious things I've experienced and I'm hanging out for the day when we reach that same level of cohesion (digital or physical) with the broader collection of people within The Liminal Web.

I feel we're all slowly coalescing towards some kind of increasingly complex state of memetic symbiosis. That we're in the process of forming a thriving web of sensemakers, meta-theorists and systems poets who are all increasingly connected to communities of like minds in our bioregions and simultaneously attuned to a global network of shared insight and collective intelligence. A kind of physical and digital ecosystem where we can always return to find solace, joy and love in the presence of those who can hold the many parts of us and be held in return.

And if what I’ve experienced so far is anything to go by I think it’s going to be an increasingly beautiful thing.

One of the new trends in the art of NFT, differs from others in high-quality detail and excellent execution of its works. in 48 hours, the project has gathered a community of more than 25,000 people and does not stop stopping. In the community of the metatrader, there is constant communication and help from the creators and administrators. The prospects of the project are aimed far ahead and have the opportunity to become leaders in the development and promotion of the highest quality NFT.

examples of works:

The genome sequence is an organism's blueprint: the set of instructions dictating its biological traits. The unfolding of these instructions is initiated by the transcription of the DNA into RNA sequences. According to the standard model, the majority of RNA sequences originate from protein-coding genes; that is, they are processed into messenger RNAs (mRNAs) which, after their export to the cytosol, are translated into proteins. While the importance of noncoding RNAs has come to the fore over the past ten years , proteins are still assumed to be the main functional and structural players in the cell. The delineation of the complete set of protein-coding genes and their alternative splice forms is, therefore, essential to the task of translating the information in the sequence of the genome into biologically relevant knowledge. This is not a trivial task, as illustrated by the fact that many years after the first drafts of the human genome sequence became available, uncertainty remains regarding the exact number of protein-coding genes , a number that might actually vary between individuals - and even between cells within the same individual - as extensive structural variation has been reported in the human genome .

Even the concept of a 'gene' is under revision. Genes have long been regarded as discrete entities located linearly along chromosomes, but recent investigations have demonstrated extensive transcriptional overlap between different genes. Specifically, genomic regions from otherwise distinct and apparently well characterized protein-coding loci (which may be very far apart in linear genomic space) often appear to combine to produce transcripts with the potential for encoding novel protein species .

Despite all these caveats, delineating the set of protein-coding genes is invariably the first step taken after completing the DNA sequencing of a genome. Indeed, the vast majority of the biology of a genome is initially inferred from the set of proteins that genome is predicted to encode. The gene-finding problem has consequently attracted wide attention within the field of bioinformatics. Since the early work of Fickett , in which methods were developed to distinguish coding from noncoding regions, a plethora of strategies have been explored and many methods developed to elucidate the exonic structure of genes in eukaryotic genomes. Figure 1 summarizes the main avenues of research. The technical details underlying these computational methods are reviewed in and the references and URLs for the methods are given in Additional data file 1. Here we will focus on the strategies being applied to delineate a number of reference human gene sets - the ones most widely used by researchers in biology - and to assess their quality and completeness. In addition, as transcript sequences (complete or partial cDNAs) are among the most reliable evidence used to annotate genes, we will also review a number of recent surveys of the transcriptional activity of the human genome. These, carried out using a variety of high-throughput technologies, have consistently reported a wealth of transcriptional activity in the human genome that had apparently not been captured through the large cDNA sequencing projects of the past two decades. It is now apparent that current gene and transcript annotation sets cover only a fraction of the total transcriptional output of the human genome.

Gene-finding strategies. Given a genome DNA sequence, information on the location of genes and transcripts can be obtained from different sources: conservation with one or more informant genomes (1); intrinsic signals involved in gene specification, such as start and stop codons and splice sites (2); the statistical properties of coding sequences (3); and, most importantly, known transcript sequences (either full-length cDNAs or partial ESTs) and protein sequences (4). Over the past two decades, a plethora of programs and strategies has been developed to combine these sources of information to obtain reliable gene predictions. The 'intrinsic' evidence from sequence signals and statistical bias can be combined (using a variety of frameworks often related to hidden Markov models [59]), to produce gene predictions (6). These programs are often referred to as ab initio or de novo gene finders. They are the programs of choice in the absence of known transcript or protein sequences or phylogenetically related genomes. If related genome sequences are available, the intrinsic information can be combined with patterns of genomic sequence conservation using programs often referred to as comparative (or dual- or multi-genome) gene finders (5). With these programs, maximum resolution is achieved when the compared genomes are at a phylogenetic distance such that there is maximum separation between the conservation in coding and noncoding regions. To increase resolution, programs have been developed that use multiple informant genomes. The most sophisticated use an underlying phylogenetic tree to appropriately weight sequence conservation depending on evolutionary distance. If cDNA and EST sequences are available, these often take priority over other sources of information. The initial map of the transcript or protein sequences onto the genome, which can be obtained using a variety of tools, including sequence-similarity searches, is refined using more sophisticated 'splice alignment' algorithms, whose explicit splice-site models allow more precise alignment across gaps corresponding to introns (8). Alternatively, cDNA and protein information can be fed into an ab initio gene-finder algorithm to give information on the exons included in the prediction (7). Often, cDNA and protein evidence is only partial; in such cases, the initial reliable gene and transcript set may be extended with more hypothetical models derived from ab initio or comparative gene finders, or from the genome mapping of cDNA and protein sequences from other species. Pipelines have been derived that automate this multi-step process (9). More recently, programs have been developed that combine the output of many individual gene finders (10). The underlying assumption in these 'combiners' is that consensus across programs increases the likelihood of the predictions. Thus, predictions are weighted according to the particular features of the program producing them. The most general frameworks allow the integration of a great variety of types of predictions - not only gene predictions, but also predictions of individual sites and exons. Despite all the developments in computational gene finding, the most reliable and complete gene annotations are still obtained after the initial alignments of cDNA and proteins onto the genome sequence are inspected manually to establish the exon boundaries of genes and transcripts (11). This is the task carried out by the HAVANA team at the Sanger Institute. The initial manual annotation can be refined even further by subsequent experimental verification of those transcript models lacking sufficiently strong evidence, as in the GENCODE project (12). Examples of gene-prediction programs (with references and URLs) corresponding to each strategy outlined here are provided in Additional data file 1.

Human reference gene sets

Since the publication of the draft human genome sequence in 2001 , a number of human gene reference sets have been created using either computational prediction or manual annotation or a mixture of the two methods. The Ensembl project was initially set up to warehouse and annotate the large amount of unfinished genomic data being produced as part of the public human genome project, as well as to provide browser capacity for both sequences and annotations (Figure 2). Ensembl has expanded and now generates automatic predictions for more than 35 species. The Ensembl gene build process is based on alignments of protein and cDNA sequences to produce a highly accurate gene set with a low rate of false positives

Another genome browser supplying sequence and annotation data for a large number of genomes is the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) genome browser database . In April 2007, UCSC released an improved version of their 'Known Gene Set' for the human genome and included putative noncoding RNAs as well as protein-coding genes. Each entry in this set requires the support of a GenBank entry and at least one other line of evidence, except for curated cDNAs, which require no other evidence.

Manual annotation still plays a significant part in annotating high-quality finished genomes. Currently, the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) reference sequences (RefSeq) collection provides a highly (manually) curated resource of multi-species transcripts, including plant, viral, vertebrate and invertebrate sequences. These are, as their name indicates, transcript-oriented and usually rely on full-length cDNAs for reliable curation, although the dataset also contains predictions using expressed sequence tags (ESTs) and partial cDNAs aligned against genomic sequence using the Gnomon prediction program . Manually reviewed RefSeq nucleotide sequences begin with the reference NM identifier whereas unreviewed predictions have the XM identifier. When a new genome is initially sequenced, researchers usually use the RefSeq data set to identify genes that are missing or identify genomic rearrangements within genes, as RefSeq is used internationally as a standard for genome annotation . RefSeq is a very reliable, but also conservative, gene reference set. Other reference sets usually include RefSeq, but extend it substantially. For instance, the UCSC 'Known Genes' has 10% more protein-coding genes, approximately five times as many putative coding genes and twice as many splice variants as RefSeq.

A different approach to manual gene annotation is to annotate transcripts aligned to the genome and take the genomic sequences as the reference rather than the cDNAs. This is how the HAVANA group at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute produces its annotation on vertebrate sequence. Currently, only three vertebrate genomes - human, mouse and zebrafish - are being fully finished and sequenced to a quality that merits manual annotation . The finished genomic sequence is analyzed using a modified Ensembl pipeline , and BLAST results of cDNAs/ESTs and proteins, along with various ab initio predictions, can be analyzed manually in the annotation browser tool Otterlace. The advantage of genomic annotation compared with cDNA annotation is that more alternative spliced variants can be predicted, as partial EST evidence and protein evidence can be used, whereas cDNA annotation is limited to availability of full-length transcripts. Moreover, genomic annotation produces a more comprehensive analysis of pseudogenes. One disadvantage, however, is that if a polymorphism occurs in the reference sequence, a coding transcript cannot be annotated, whereas cDNA annotation can select the major haplotypic form and is, therefore, not limited by a reference sequence.

In 2006, the groups mentioned above (NCBI (RefSeq), UCSC, the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute (HAVANA) and Ensembl) identified a need to collaborate and produce a consensus gene set for the human reference genome as there was still no official agreement between the different databases on the human protein-coding genes. Referred to as the Consensus Coding Sequence Set (CCDS) , it currently contains only those coding transcripts that are equivalent in each database's gene build from start codon to stop codon. The latest human CCDS release (May 2008) contains 20,151 consensus coding sequences representing 17,052 genes. For the first time, this provides researchers with a consistent reliable gene set that has been derived independently from a combination of manual and automated annotation by three groups (Ensembl, NCBI and HAVANA) and quality checked at the UCSC. The protein-coding genes that differ between the gene sets of the different groups and cannot be merged automatically will be re-examined manually and either rejected or added to the consensus set if they get a unanimous vote from the groups at NCBI, UCSC and HAVANA.

Complementary to the CCDS project is the GENCODE project. The GENCODE consortium was initially formed to identify and map all protein-coding genes within the regions selected in the framework of the ENCODE project, representing 1% of human genome sequence. This was achieved by a combination of initial manual annotation by HAVANA, computational predictions and experimental validation, and the consequent refinement of the annotation on the basis of these experimental results. The project has been funded in 2008 to annotate the whole reference human genome sequence and experimentally verify a number of putative loci. The scaled-up annotation includes identification of pseudogenes and noncoding loci supported by transcript evidence. The initial manual annotation is compared with automated predictions to highlight inconsistencies based on comparative analysis or new transcript data. It is expected that, upon completion in 2011, this gene set will become the standard human gene reference set.

Assessing the annotation

The issue obviously arises of the reliability of the reference sets. Usually, the experimentally verified manual annotations, such as those produced by GENCODE, are considered the most exhaustive and reliable reference human gene sets. Based on 'bona fide' cDNA sequences, the annotated gene models are, in these cases, generally correct - although issues still remain because, on occasion, the same cDNA sequence can be mapped into the human genome through alternative exonic structures. Completeness is more difficult to assess, because it is unclear how representative of the complete human transcriptome the current set of cDNA sequences is.

To assess the completeness of GENCODE, the EGASP community experiment was organized in 2005. In this experiment a number of computational predictions were evaluated against the GENCODE annotation. Then, a subset of high-confidence computational predictions that were not present in the annotation was tested by reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) on a panel of human tissues. Only a handful of these predictions could be verified, strongly suggesting completeness of the GENCODE annotation (with respect to computational predictions of protein-coding genes). A second goal of EGASP was to assess to what extent purely computational methods can reproduce the slow and expensive manual annotations. In this regard, EGASP results indicated that although computational methods are quite accurate in identifying protein-coding exons with an overall accuracy of more than 80% (in terms of both the fraction of real exons correctly identified and the fraction of predicted exons that are real), finding the complete transcript structure is more challenging, with the most accurate methods correctly predicting only about 60% of the annotated protein-coding transcripts. This indicates that computational methods cannot yet totally replace human expertise in gene annotation.

After mapping a cDNA to the genome, the protein-coding status of the transcript needs to be assessed, and the boundaries of the eventual coding regions precisely delimited - so that it is possible to identify the correct amino acid sequence of the protein, from which most of the biology of the transcript will be inferred. As direct evidence of the existence of the protein is generally absent, the criterion often used to annotate a transcript as protein-coding is the existence of an open reading frame (ORF). However, this criterion has recently been put in question by a number of methods developed to assess the quality of protein-coding gene annotations. These are based on the principle that gene models that conflict with our current knowledge about functional protein-coding genes are incorrect. Thus, the rationale of the method of Clamp et al. is that functional protein-coding genes are subject to purifying selection, and are therefore expected to show evolutionary conservation. The authors used two types of measures for the assessment of evolutionary conservation of predicted human genes: reading frame conservation (RFC; based on the observation that indels do not affect significantly the size of functional proteins) and codon substitution frequency (CSF; based on the observation that the patterns of nucleotide substitution in functional protein-coding genes is different from that observed on random DNA). In their analysis of a number of human gene reference sets, Clamp et al. identified around 1,200 human 'orphans': ORFs that lack homology with known genes. Both RFC and CSF analysis revealed that the behavior of many of these human orphans is essentially indistinguishable from that of matched random controls, and is very different from that of non-orphan protein-coding genes. From these results, the authors concluded that, overall, about 15% of the entries in the gene catalogs investigated are not valid protein-coding genes.

While the quality-control method of Clamp et al. can distinguish protein-coding genes from non-coding sequences, it is less suitable for identifying gene predictions that are only partially correct. Indeed, if an annotated gene misses one or more exons, or a fraction of one exon, it may still display the expected evolutionary characteristics of protein-coding genes. To find errors in the annotated protein-coding genes, the MisPred approach uses several criteria that hold for different subsets of correctly folded, correctly localized, functionally competent protein molecules. Hypothetical proteins that violate any of these rules are judged to be nonfunctional and the corresponding coding regions to be misidentified. For example, one of the quality-control tools of this approach is based on the observation that the number of residues in closely related members of a globular protein domain family usually falls within a relatively narrow range. Accordingly, proteins containing domains that consist of significantly larger or smaller numbers of residues than closely related members of the same family may be suspected to be nonviable and the corresponding genes to be mispredicted. Several quality-control tools in MisPred address the issue of whether the predicted protein is able to reach the cellular compartment where it could be properly folded, stable and functional. The rationale of these tools is that mislocalized proteins are usually misfolded, unstable and nonfunctional. For example, predicted proteins that contain extracellular domains but lack sequence signals that could direct these domains to the extracellular space are likely to be misfolded and nonfunctional. Analyses of predicted human sequences with MisPred tools revealed that 2.3% of Ensembl entries (v41) and 3.4% of proteins predicted by the NCBI's Gnomon pipeline are likely to be mislocalized and/or misfolded as they lack appropriate sequence signals or they contain domains that deviate from normal size .

In a similar spirit, the EPipe pipeline of the BioSapiens consortium incorporates a variety of tools to assess the structural and functional properties of hypothetical proteins. Analysis of the GENCODE peptides with these tools revealed that many of the potential alternative gene products have markedly different structure and function from their constitutively spliced counterparts. For the vast majority of these alternatively spliced forms, there is little evidence that they have a role as functional proteins, and many splice variants encode abnormal proteins that are mislocalized and/or misfolded .

Alternative splicing and protein complexity

Alternative splicing is common in mammalian genomes, and it has been suggested to be a means of increasing protein complexity from a limited number of genes. Therefore, any complete gene set should include annotation of the protein-coding variants. Detailed cDNA mapping into the genome, as in the GENCODE annotation, reveals that alternative splicing is widespread, affecting more than 86% of multi-exon gene loci with an average of 5.7 transcript variants per locus. While this is a proportion of alternative-splicing events much larger than that in other human reference gene sets, the use of novel high-throughput methods that concatenate and sequence the 5' tags of transcripts (cap analysis gene expression(CAGE) ) or sequence paired 5' and 3' cDNA ends has revealed that traditional methods based on cDNA clone sequencing were not fully surveying the complexity of mammalian transcriptomes. Similarly, the (re)analysis of gene-trapping sequences has unveiled thousands of novel transcripts. Tiling oligonucleotide arrays that monitor the expression of the non-repeated fraction of the genome have consistently identified many more transcribed fragments than previously anticipated . The combination of all these experimental approaches in the frame of the ENCODE project surprisingly showed that more than 90% of the genome is transcribed as primary RNA , with at least 15% being incorporated into processed transcripts. Many such novel transcripts map to protein-coding loci, as revealed by experiments in which RACE (rapid amplification of 3' ends) products originating in these loci were hybridized onto tiling arrays. When applied to the ENCODE regions, these experiments yielded as many novel as annotated exons . Often these exons corresponded to tissue-specific 5' distal transcription start sites (TSSs) . These distal TSSs map hundreds of kilobases upstream of the currently annotated TSS and often overlap with a 5'-positioned gene, suggesting extensive overlap between protein-coding loci (Additional data file 2). Next-generation sequencing will further enhance our capacity to sequence the transcriptome of the cell (RNAseq). Indeed, preliminary results demonstrate that RNAseq can detect 25% more genes than microarrays can and that a third of the sequences emanate from unannotated regions .

Interestingly, only a small fraction of these novel transcripts seem to have protein-coding capacity - often through transcription-induced chimeras that fuse two different ORFs that may be encoded by genes far apart in the genome. Instead, the majority correspond to 'novel' noncoding RNA classes, such as transcribed pseudogenes , antisense transcripts and structured RNAs , that might regulate transcription and/or translation. For example, Watanabe et al. recently described precursor transcripts of small interfering RNAs (siRNAs) that are derived from transcribed pseudogenes. Other yet-unannotated RNAs appear to be processed into short RNAs, some of which, like the 'promoter-associated sRNAs' (PASRs) and 'termini-associated sRNAs' (TASRs), are coupled to the expression state of protein-coding genes . Finally, it was postulated that some of these novel transcripts might be the outcome of interchromosomal transcript chimerism: that is, chimeric transcripts resulting from the proximity of active genes in so-called transcription factories .

In summary, recent technological developments and large-scale whole-genome analyses have shown that mammalian transcriptomes are composed of a swarming mass of different overlapping transcripts, sometimes originating from both strands, and suggest that only a small fraction of the transcriptional complexity has been discovered. Little evidence exists, however, that the majority of this transcript complexity leads to protein complexity. In fact, all evidence suggests otherwise - that the human protein-coding gene set is near consolidation. Thus, the 5.7 average transcripts per coding locus annotated in GENCODE translates to only 1.7 proteins per locus (because a large fraction of transcript variation corresponds to noncoding transcripts or accumulates in the untranslated regions of coding transcripts) . Moreover, if the GENCODE proteins flagged as problematic by the protein-assessment methods discussed above are ignored, there are barely 1.3 annotated proteins per locus - a somewhat unexpected return to one of the founding axioms of molecular biology: Beadle and Tatum's 'one gene one protein' principle. The discrepancy between a complex, variable and largely unexplored population of RNA molecules and a relatively small, stable, and well defined population of proteins constitutes one of the challenges that molecular biology needs to address to fully elucidate cellular function.

The bridle and helmet of Constantine

Sozomen and Theodoret reported that when Helena, the mother of Constantine the Great, discovered the True Cross in Jerusalem in the fourth century AD, the Holy Nails were recovered too. Helena left all but a few fragments of the cross in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, but returned with the nails to Constantinople. As Theodoret tells it in his Ecclesiastical History, chapter xvii:

The mother of the emperor, on learning the accomplishment of her desire, gave orders that a portion of the nails should be inserted in the royal helmet, in order that the head of her son might be preserved from the darts of his enemies. The other portion of the nails she ordered to be formed into the bridle of his horse, not only to ensure the safety of the emperor, but also to fulfil an ancient prophecy; for long before Zechariah, the prophet, had predicted that 'There shall be upon the bridles of the horses Holiness unto the Lord Almighty.

The fifth-century Church historian of Constantinople, Socrates of Constantinople, wrote in his Ecclesiastical History, which was finished shortly after 439, that after Constantine was proclaimed Caesar and then Emperor, he ordered that all honor be paid to his mother Helena, to make up for the neglect paid her by her former husband, Constantius Chlorus. After her conversion to Christianity, Constantine sent her on a quest to find the cross and nails used to crucify Jesus. A Jew called Judas (in later retellings further called Judas Cyriacus) led her to the place where they were buried. Several miracles were claimed to prove the authenticity of these items, and Helena returned with a piece of the cross and the nails. Socrates wrote that one nail was used to make a bridle and one was used to make the Helmet of Constantine. Two relics exist that have the form of a bridle and are claimed to be the bridle of Constantine: one in the apse of the Cathedral of Milan, and the other in the cathedral treasury of Carpentras Cathedral.

The Iron Crown of Lombardy has been said to contain one of the nails; however, scientific analysis has shown that the crown contains no iron. The band that was supposed to have been formed from a nail is actually 99% silver.

Nails venerated as those of Christ's crucifixion

Holy Nail in Santa Maria della Scala in Siena

In the Basilica of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme in Rome. (spike of a nail)

In the Holy Lance of the German imperial regalia in the Hofburg Palace in Vienna.

In the Iron Crown of Lombardy in the Cathedral of Monza.

In the treasury of Trier Cathedral.

In Bamberg Cathedral. (middle part of a nail)

In the form of a bridle, in the apse of the Cathedral of Milan (see Rito della Nivola)

In the form of a bridle, in the cathedral treasury of Carpentras.

In the monastery of San Nicolò l'Arena in Catania. (head of a nail)

In the cathedral of Colle di Val d'Elsa, near Siena

See also

Nortia, an Etrusco-Roman goddess for whom the nail was an attribute

also known as Stephenson 2 DFK 1 or RSGC2-18, is possibly a red supergiant or red hypergiant star in the constellation of Scutum, although some sources consider it to be a foreground object. It lies near the open cluster Stephenson 2, which is located about 6,000 parsecs (20,000 ly) away from Earth in the Scutum–Centaurus Arm of the Milky Way galaxy, and is assumed to be one of a group of stars at a similar distance. It is possibly among the largest known stars, and one of the most luminous red supergiants, with a possible radius around 2,150 times that of the Sun (R☉), which would correspond to a volume nearly 10 billion times that of the Sun. If placed at the center of earth's Solar System, its photosphere could potentially engulf the orbit of Saturn.

Observation history

The open cluster Stephenson 2 was discovered by American astronomer Charles Bruce Stephenson in 1990 in the data obtained by a deep infrared survey. The cluster is also known as RSGC2, one of several massive open clusters in Scutum, each containing multiple red supergiants.

The brightest star in the region of the cluster was given the identifier 1 in the first analysis of cluster member properties. However, it was not considered to be a member of Stephenson 2 due to its outlying position, abnormally high brightness, and slightly atypical proper motion. The authors however note Stephenson 2-18 as having a significant infrared excess, possibly because of an extreme mass-losing episode. As a result, they state that the star may be a red hypergiant.

In a later study, the same star was given the number 18 and assigned to an outlying group of stars called Stephenson 2 SW, assumed to be at a similar distance to the core cluster. The designation St2-18 (short for Stephenson 2-18) is often used for the star, following the numbering from Deguchi (2010). To avoid confusion from using the same number for different stars and different numbers for the same star, designations from Davis (2007) are often given a prefix of DFK or D, for example Stephenson 2 DFK 1.

Physical properties

St 2-18 shows the traits and properties of a highly luminous red supergiant, with a spectral type of M6, which is unusual for a supergiant star. This places it at the top right corner of the Hertzsprung–Russell diagram, a region characterized for exceptionally large and luminous low-temperature stars.

One calculation for finding the bolometric luminosity by fitting the Spectral Energy Distribution (SED) gives the star a luminosity of nearly 440,000 ☉, with an effective temperature of 3,200 K, which corresponds to a very large radius of 2,150 R☉ (1.50×109 km; 10.0 au; 930,000,000 mi),[a] which would be considerably larger and more luminous than theoretical models of the largest, and most luminous red supergiants possible (roughly 1,500 ☉ and 105.5 ☉ respectively). An alternate but older calculation from 2010, still assuming membership of the Stephenson 2 cluster at 5.5 kpc but based on 12 and 25 μm fluxes, gives a much lower and relatively modest luminosity of 90,000 ☉.A newer calculation, based on SED integration and assuming a distance of 5.8 kpc, gives a bolometric luminosity of 630,000 ☉. However, it has been noted that its SED is somewhat peculiar, with the fluxes that couldn't fit with the accepted range of appropriate temperatures for an RSG. This would suggest a higher extinction, which would make it be even more luminous. Because of this unusually high luminosity, the star's membership to the Stephenson 2 cluster has been considered doubtful, though it is also stated that it cannot necessarily be ruled out yet.[5][b]LRLLL

In 2013, an article describing the red supergiants in Stephenson 2 stated that Stephenson 2-18 (referred to as D1) and D2 (another member of Stephenson 2) have maser emissions, indicating that they have the highest mass loss in the cluster.

Membership

It has been debated for a while if this star is actually part of its supposed cluster. Due to its radial velocity being below the other cluster stars, some sources state that the star is unlikely to be a foreground giant; however, more recent papers considered the star an unlikely member due to its extreme properties.

Uncertainty

The distance of Stephenson 2-18 has been stated to have an uncertainty greater than 50%, and the radius of 2,150 ☉ is very likely an overestimation because it greatly exceeds the theoretical limit of 1,500 ☉. Another estimate of the luminosity gave a value of 90,000 ☉.

Observation data

Epoch J2000 Equinox J2000

Constellation Scutum

Right ascension 18h 39m 02.3709s[1]

Declination −06° 05′ 10.5357″[1]

Characteristics

Evolutionary stage Red supergiant, possible red hypergiant[2]

Spectral type ~M6[3]

Apparent magnitude (G) 15.2631±0.0092[1]

Apparent magnitude (J) 7.150[4]

Apparent magnitude (H) 4.698[4]

Apparent magnitude (K) 2.9[4]

Astrometry

Proper motion (μ) RA: −3.045±0.511[1] mas/yr

Dec.: −5.950±0.480[1] mas/yr

Parallax (π) −0.0081 ± 0.3120[1] mas

Distance 18,900[5] ly

(5,800[5] pc)

Details

Radius ~2,150[6][a] R☉

Luminosity 437,000[6] (90,000[7]–630,000[5][b]) L☉

Temperature 3,200[6] K

Observational history

Because quasars were not recognized until 1963, the nature of this object was unknown when it was first noted in a 1957 survey of faint blue stars (mainly white dwarfs) that lie away from the plane of the Milky Way. On photographic plates taken with the 0.7 m Schmidt telescope at the Tonantzintla Observatory in Mexico, it appeared "decidedly violet" and was listed by the Mexican astronomers Braulio Iriarte and Enrique Chavira as entry number 618 in the Tonantzintla Catalogue.

In 1970, a radio survey at Bologna in Italy discovered radio emission from Ton 618, indicating that it was a quasar. Marie-Helene Ulrich then obtained optical spectra of Ton 618 at the McDonald Observatory which showed emission lines typical of a quasar. From the high redshift of the lines Ulrich deduced that Ton 618 was very distant, and hence was one of the most luminous quasars known.

Components

Supermassive black hole

As a quasar, Ton 618 is believed to be the active galactic nucleus at the center of a galaxy, the engine of which is a supermassive black hole feeding on intensely hot gas and matter in an accretion disc. The light originating from the quasar is estimated to be 10.8 billion years old. Due to the brilliance of the central quasar, the surrounding galaxy is outshined by it and hence is not visible from Earth. With an absolute magnitude of −30.7, it shines with a luminosity of 4×1040 watts, or as brilliantly as 140 trillion times that of the Sun, making it one of the brightest objects in the known Universe.

Like other quasars, Ton 618 has a spectrum containing emission lines from cooler gas much further out than the accretion disc, in the broad-line region. The size of the broad-line region can be calculated from the brightness of the quasar radiation that is lighting it up. Shemmer and coauthors used both NV and CIV emission lines in order to calculate the widths of the Hβ spectral line of at least 29 QSO's, including Ton 618, as a direct measurement of their accretion rates and hence the mass of the central black hole.

The emission lines in the spectrum of Ton 618 have been found to be unusually wide, indicating that the gas is travelling very fast; the full width half maxima of Ton 618 has been the largest of the 29 QSO's, with hints of 7,000 km/s speeds of infalling material by a direct measure of the Hβ line, indication of a very strong gravitational force. From this measure, the mass of the central black hole of Ton 618 is at least 66 billion solar masses. This is considered one of the highest masses ever recorded for such an object; higher than the mass of all stars in the Milky Way galaxy combined, which is 64 billion solar masses, and 15,300 times more massive than Sagittarius A*, the Milky Way's central black hole. With such high mass, Ton 618 may fall into a proposed new classification of ultramassive black holes. A black hole of this mass has a Schwarzschild radius of 1,300 AU (about 390 billion km in diameter) which is more than 40 times the distance from Neptune to the Sun.

Lyman-alpha nebula

The nature of Ton 618 as a Lyman-alpha emitter has been well-documented since at least the 1980s. Lyman-alpha emitters are characterized by their significant emission of the Lyman-alpha line - a special wavelength emitted by neutral hydrogen (121.567 nm wavelength, in the vacuum ultraviolet). Such objects, however, have proven to be very difficult to study due to the nature of the Lyman-alpha line being strongly absorbed by air in the Earth's atmosphere, making identified Lyman-alpha emitters only limited to objects in the distant universe due to their high redshift. Ton 618, with its luminous emission of Lyman-alpha radiation along with its high redshift, has made it one of the most important objects in the study of the Lyman-alpha forest.

Observations made by the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) in 2021 revealed the apparent source of the Lyman-alpha radiation of Ton 618 - an enormous cloud of gas surrounding the quasar and its host galaxy. This would make it a Lyman-alpha blob, one of the largest such objects yet known.

Lyman-alpha blobs (LABs) are huge collections of gases, or nebulae - that are also classified as Lyman-alpha emitters. These enormous, galaxy-sized clouds are some of the largest nebulae known to exist, with some identified LABs in the 2000s reaching sizes of at least hundreds of thousands of light-years across.

In the case of Ton 618, the enormous Lyman-alpha nebula surrounding it has the diameter of at least 100 kiloparsecs (320,000 light-years), twice the size of the Milky Way. The nebula consists of two parts - an inner molecular outflow and an extensive cold molecular gas in its circumgalactic medium, each having the mass of 50 billion M☉, with both of them being aligned to the radio jet produced by the central quasar. The extreme radiation from Ton 618 excites the hydrogen in the nebula so much that causes it to glow brightly in the Lyman-alpha line, consistent with the observations of other LABs driven by their inner galaxies. Since both quasars and LABs are precursors of modern-day galaxies, the observation on Ton 618 and its enormous LAB gave hindsight to the processes that drive the evolution of massive galaxies, in particular probing their ionization and early development.

Yuri Nikolaevich Zakharenko (January 4, 1952, Vasilevichi, Polesskaya oblast — May 7, 1999)

Biography

He graduated from the Volgograd Higher School of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR in 1977, the Academy of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR in 1987.

He served his military service in the Baltic Fleet.

He worked as an investigator in Svetlogorsk, Gomel, head of the investigative Department, Deputy head of the Internal Affairs Department of the Gomel Regional Executive Committee (1977-1991), Deputy Head of the Interregional Department for Combating Organized Crime of the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs (1991-1992), head of the Investigative Department, then the Investigative Committee of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Republic of Belarus (1992-1994), Minister of Internal Affairs of the Republic of Belarus (July 28, 1994 — October 16, 1995).

Participated in the last congress of the CPSU. He was in the team of Alexander Lukashenko during the 1994 presidential elections.

On July 28, 1994, by Decree of President Lukashenko No. 11, he was appointed Minister of Internal Affairs of the Republic of Belarus. On August 5, 1994, by Decree of President Lukashenko No. 22, he was awarded the special rank of Major General of the internal Service[2].

On October 16, 1995, by Decree of President Lukashenko No. 424, he was dismissed from the post of Minister of Internal Affairs. Prior to that, the media wrote about the minister's conflict with the head of the Presidential Affairs Department, Ivan Titenkov[2].

On April 16, 1996, by Presidential Decree No. 149, Lukashenka was demoted to the rank of police colonel and dismissed from the Ministry of Internal Affairs for gross financial violations and omissions in work.

In February 1998, he joined the National Executive Committee, created by the opposition, Chairman of the Security Committee. He was a member of the National Committee of the UCP.

Disappearance

He went missing on May 7, 1999. According to the official version, it happened in the evening near Zhukovsky Street in Minsk, when Yuri Zakharenko was abducted with violence by unidentified persons and taken away in a passenger car in an unknown direction. Upon the disappearance of the ex-Minister of Internal Affairs, a criminal case was initiated on September 17, 1999 on the grounds of a crime under article 101 of the Criminal Code of the Republic of Belarus ("Premeditated murder", as amended in 1960).

Versions of disappearance

Demonstration in Warsaw in memory of the disappeared people in Belarus

According to former GRU Colonel Vladimir Borodach, Zakharenko "captured the Lukashenkovsky death squadron, he was subjected to severe torture, beaten, and used psychotropic special means. The general was beaten out of a confession allegedly about the preparation of a coup d'etat. Realizing that he would not confirm his testimony in court, he was shot."

In his interview for Radio Liberty, V. Borodach said that he managed to get on the trail of the crime. He allegedly met with the head of the crematorium of the Northern Cemetery, who, on the orders of people from the special services, illegally burned Zakharenko's body. Later, someone attacked the head of the crematorium, beat him, doused him with gasoline and burned him. After this attack, Colonel Borodach was warned by people from the special services, and he decided to leave Belarus. Now the bearded man lives in forced emigration in Germany.

Nikolay Cherginets is sure that Zakharenko was killed, but Lukashenka is not involved in this.

In 2020, a former SOBR fighter Garavsky told about the circumstances of Zakharenko's murder.

Possible appearance in Germany

In 2010, in an interview with American professor Grigory Ioffe, as well as in 2019 in an interview with A. Venediktov, A. Lukashenko said that Yu. Zakharenko, being a minister, borrowed a large sum of money in Ukraine, which he did not return. He also noted that five years after Zakharenko's disappearance, he was photographed in Germany and the photo was published in a German newspaper. After that, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Belarus sent a request to Germany, to which no response was received. Volchek, the head of the human rights center "Legal Aid to the population", a representative of the Zakharenko family, said that Yu. Zakharenko had no business in Ukraine.

Family

Mother - Ulyana Grigoryevna (died in 2018 at the 95th year of life), there was a brother Vladimir. Wife Olga, daughters Elena and Julia, grandson Kirill was born on November 3, 1998, and the second grandson Denis was born in 2009.

Posts and titles

July 28, 1994 - Minister of Internal Affairs of the Republic of Belarus

August 5, 1994 — Major General of the Internal Service

October 16, 1995 - dismissed from the post of Minister of Internal Affairs of the Republic of Belarus

On April 16 , 1996 , he was demoted to the special rank of colonel and dismissed from the Ministry of Internal Affairs