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Julian Assange extradition hearing begins today | DW News

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Film about Julian Assange and Wikileaks starring Benedict Cumberbatch

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Very touching story of Bob Ross and his benefactors...

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Where Are All the Bob Ross Paintings? We Found Them.

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I mean....?!?

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Grimes and Elon Musk CHANGED Their Son's Name

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Amazing graphic novel by Alan Moore in 10 episodes

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V For Vendetta comics : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

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iam not entirely sure if this is the complete collection or not

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An interesting interview from 2011. Very relevant still...

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Julian Assange: The 2011 60 Minutes Interview

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A text video about Anonymous

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with Joe Rogan

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Joe Rogan Experience #1536 - Edward Snowden

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Very accurate and informative, includes translations in context.

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Linguee | Dictionnaire anglais-français (et autres langues)

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Dictionnaire anglais-français avec des millions de phrases traduites en anglais-français. Moteur de recherche de traductions anglais-français.

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What Barbie Would Look Like in Real Life?

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What Barbie Would Look Like in Real Life?

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Full version of the body measurement experiment including KEN!!!!

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What Barbie Would Look Like In Real Life

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Very interesting documentary about a unique woman and her creation!

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A concurrent of Barbie claiming to be more realistic.

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The Official Lammily Commercial | As Seen On TV

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à rendre obligatoirement la semaine de la rentrée en classe entière.
AUCUN DEVOIR RENDU APRES CE DELAI NE SERA NOTE!

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A sketch from the legendary Saturday Night Live starring Amy Poehler (Parks and Recreation) and Britney Spears.

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Inside Barbie's Dreamhouse: Skipper - SNL

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A non exhaustive list...

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A great website for music fans!
Find the lyrics of your favourite songs explained!

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Genius is the world's biggest collection of song lyrics and musical knowledge.

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In a year that's broken the world and shattered reality, imagining Black futures can help plot a pathway to recovery.

A comet strikes New York City, killing almost everyone in sight. A survivor named Jim Davis, a Black man, searches the rubble for others, eventually finding and rescuing a white woman named Julia. They share their shock and grief, soon realizing they might be two of the only remaining people on Earth. The circumstances force Julia to reconsider her pre-comet racism: "How foolish our human distinctions seem-now." Jim and Julia quickly develop an intimate bond.

Soon after, they encounter a group of white men, Julia's fiance among them. They tell her that only New York was destroyed, that the rest of the world remains intact. In an instant, Julia relapses into her pre-comet white life. She's indifferent as her companions hurl racial slurs at Jim. Suddenly he is unimportant to her, and she never looks in his direction again.

So ends "The Comet," a relatively obscure but profoundly consequential short story by W. E. B. DuBois. Though best-known for his searing analyses of history and sociology, DuBois' foray into fantasy in 1920 is among his most reflective works, ruthlessly blunt in its stance on racism's inevitability. Most importantly, "The Comet" helped lay the foundation for a paradigm known as Afrofuturism.

A century later, as a comet carrying disease and social unrest has upended the world, Afrofuturism may be more relevant than ever. Its vision can help guide us out of the rubble, and help us to consider universes of better alternatives.

When most people think of Afrofuturism today, the Marvel Cinematic Universe's Wakanda comes to mind, an African country that hides advanced technology from the world. Within Wakanda, Afrofuturism manifests most explicitly in the award-winning fashion and set design, a hypnotic blend of African traditional art and dress, cyberpunk, and space opera.

While highly visible examples like Black Panther certainly qualify, Afrofuturism has more traditionally lived in subgenres of literature, philosophy, music, fashion, and other aesthetics. Dubbing something Afrofuturistic, says renowned sociologist Alondra Nelson, is "very much in the eye of the beholder and this is a good thing. Afrofuturism should be a big tent of expanding borders of the possibilities for Black life." Expansive as it is, Nelson, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study and pioneering scholar of Afrofuturism, offered a tidy yet illuminating definition: Afrofuturism describes "visions of the future-including science, technology and its cultures in the laboratory, in social theory, and in aesthetics-through the experience and perspective of African diasporic communities." In all of Afrofuturism's many forms, questions are projected about the Black experience into the future.

As technology is a cultural instrument through which we understand and build the future, Afrofuturistic ideas often involve imaginations or analyses of how technology intersects with Black politics or aesthetics. As Nelson notes, "A facet of Afrofuturism that should not get overshadowed is Black people's longstanding, innovative, and critical engagement with science and technology."

The most resonant and front-facing Afrofuturistic relics are in the arts, namely speculative fiction, music, and fashion. Like DuBois' "The Comet," Afrofuturistic sci-fi grapples with how race and difference manifest in future worlds. This is as true in the 20th century works of Octavia Butler and Samuel Delany as it is of the recent novels of N. K. Jemisin and Nnedi Okorafor. Okorafor has said she didn't read much traditional science fiction growing up because she "couldn't relate to these stories preoccupied with xenophobia, colonization, and seeing aliens as 'others.'" Her African mythology-inspired Binti trilogy and her other works are couched in a different understanding of history, which doubtlessly influences her conception of the future: "My science fiction has different ancestors-African ones."

The most popular Afrofuturist authors write deftly at this margin, where they are just as future-obsessed as their peers, but with different takes on questions about who gets to play which roles in these futures. For example, Jemisin's Hundred Thousand Kingdoms (2010) is a story about empire and slavery that plays out in a supernatural realm of deities and monsters. Butler's 1979 classic Kindred famously features an African-American writer who travels between modern Los Angeles and a Maryland plantation during the antebellum period.

In music, acts like Sun Ra and Parliament Funkadelic built their looks and sounds on a marriage between Black culture and futuristic iconography. For Afrofuturist artists, technology is an essential part of the sound. Play Parliament's acid-infused take on the Motown sound in "I Bet You" and feel the future course through your veins. "These are masters of craft, originators of new sonic (and therefore social) worlds," says Nelson. "They all break, deform, and remake standard uses of music technology, genre and even expectations of race, gender, and sexuality."

Afrofuturism's importance also transcends the arts, and insofar as it can be described as a political identity or ideology (Nelson and other scholars leave open this possibility), then it provides a lens through which we can view the present and future.

We could have asked the Afrofuturist of 1985 what they thought about the War on Drugs. We could ask those in 1995 about Sub-Saharan Africa's experience with the HIV pandemic, and in 2005 about the War on Terror.

Why do we care about what the Afrofuturist has to say? And why would we suspect that their answers would differ from that of an average futurist? It is because the Black experience is defined by a historical struggle for existence, the right to live, to be considered a person, to be afforded basic rights, in pursuit of (political, social, economic) equality. Because of this, the Afrofuturist can see the parts of the present and future that reside in the status quo's blind spots.

Futurists ask what tomorrow's hoverboards and flying cars are made of. Afrofuturists ask who will build them? And does their commercial use fall out of their utility in military or law enforcement?

Futurists labor over questions about the nature of Android consciousness and empathy. Afrofuturists ask how race might be wired into Android consciousness, whether the android world might be as divided as ours is.

These are simple but nontrivial questions. Their answers contain the necessary details for building science fiction worlds that are truly convincing (which is one of the sole charges of good science fiction), or real worlds that science fiction makes us aspire to.

We can ask analogous questions of modern society, speculating what our world will look like after experiencing a triad of world-changing current events: the largest pandemic in a century, a social movement that challenges the institutions of policing and criminal justice, and an upcoming presidential election that almost certainly serves as a referendum on democracy in the United States (and the legitimacy of white nationalism-driven fascism globally).

We should ask Afrofuturism what it thinks of these events. While the specific answers might enlighten, real insights are found in the act of answering, as it forces us to reconsider and augment our predictions with layers that were missing.

Covid-19 is the curse that keeps on cursing, already taking more than half a million lives globally and nearly 140,000 in the US. The curve's dark bend, however, is not simply in how the virus continues to spread and kill, but in how the pandemic slithers along an insidious path, feeding on misinformation rich in credentialism, charlatanism, pseudoscience, conspiracy, and political propaganda.

The resulting cosmic slop looks more grotesque in July than it was in March. The world is so full of bad messages that make-believe conspiracies go to war with each other on our social media timelines; carpetbaggers storm in with reckless abandon, attacking the public's basic trust in science and information; epidemiologists debate with Silicon Valley technologists, or other scientists, about whether things are getting better or worse; the science of mask-wearing regresses into hapless debates about the definition of "freedom." Amid the torrent, fact-makers and science-defenders struggle to climb from the rubble and stay motivated and engaged.

The race and racism narrative manifested early in the United States leg of the epidemic. The signature is clear: Black and Latino people in the United States are three times as likely to be infected, and twice as likely to die as their white counterparts. The numbers alone still hide the fact that it is racism and structural violence that drive these disparities. Of the pandemic, the Afrofuturist would be of two minds:

They may hope, as with DuBois' naive Jim and Julia, that a disaster may unify us. That is, insofar as SARS-CoV-2 can infect us across whatever groupings, we may conclude that we're all humans, all of us affected by a disease.

The pessimistic part of the Afrofuturist would, however, understand that in-demand technology, including medical technology, will always be relatively unavailable to Black people (unless that technology is for criminal justice purposes). Reports about biases in how ventilators are distributed fits this narrative: When technology is in limited supply, and is tied to survival, Black lives are the last ones spared.

Even worse, a popular interpretation reads that the racial narrative of the early US epidemic fueled the nation's negligent response. That is, excess Black deaths are no call to action. And because the racial divide became the subject of so much early coverage in the American epidemic, it served to calm the nerves of the American majority: If the Black people and Latinos are dying from it, so be it. This notion is, of course, unscientific and a losing strategy for everyone (racism always is), but reality supports the idea that this model is at work.

In that sense, Covid-19 is even more tragic than "The Comet." In DuBois' imagined world, the reader is at least offered a glimpse at the possibility that the disaster unifies us. Covid-19, however, was racialized from the outset, with anti-Asian scapegoating that persists. That it took on a Black and Brown face in the United States immediately left no time for us to even dream of a utopian scenario. In the end, Covid-19 hasn't unified a damn thing.

Black Lives and Cybernetic Cops

While Covid-19 has offered no consistently good news, the Black Lives Matter movement, which reemerged internationally following the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, has laid the groundwork for productive, practical conversations about policing and the purpose of criminal justice. Some of the loudest voices have focused on defunding the police, a concept that isn't a slogan, but rather, a set of policy proposals for reconsidering how police departments are organized and financed.

Other criminal-justice related considerations have come along for the ride. In response to the protests, a groundswell of support has grown for limiting the use of facial recognition software. Mathematicians have even urged their colleagues to boycott work on policing algorithms.

While the state of the world may have changed little in the month-plus since the Black Lives Matters protests began, the discourse around the just use of technology is encouraging. Here, we can point to Afrofuturist works like poet and scholar Jackie Wang's "The Cybernetic Cop," a 2018 multimedia performance and essay that uses imagery from 1987's Robocop to articulate the perils of technology-driven policing. As racism is a character in the story, the essay highlights the interaction between modern technology and the unethical trappings of modern policing. It might only have been artful or symbolic, but her essay became much more prescient following the January 2020 arrest of Julian-Borchak Williams, in the first high-profile instance of a mistaken arrest resulting from an error in an algorithm.

Technology-as-instrument-of-control is one of sci-fi's oldest tropes. But it is in how this manifests in policing that the Afrofuturist finds its voice: The technology that we use simply reinforces the lines that humans have already drawn. As America's defining line has always been a racial one, technology often acts to redouble them.

A Pessimist and a Futurist Walk into 2020

While Covid-19 and the Black Lives Matter protests are well underway, the 2020 election season is just rounding into shape. Thinking about events that haven't yet happened is the truest test of any futurist philosophy. The point is not to predict the events exactly, but to ask of our futurism: What possibilities does it offer?

Purely pessimistic takes on the future are unsatisfying because of their poverty. That the racists will win in the long run is a reasonable prediction, but we need more. How will this happen? What will the resistance actually look like? History works like science fiction: We want to know who did what and why they did it, even if we know who wins in the end.

Nelson says that an Afrofuturist lens on today tells us that "dystopia can be an enduring state for Black communities, but that utopia is also always being imagined, embodied, dreamed, and constituted in everyday acts of thriving." The Afrofuturist cannot tell you about the trajectory of an epidemic, predict the future of policing, or an election's outcome. But it can say that, whatever our plights, a better world is possible. And more specifically, that an interaction with technology offers us a route to resistance.

In Covid-19, the Afrofuturist calls on us to think about the use of technology to ameliorate the effects of the pandemic. Yes, a vaccine is the best public health hope. But what other organic innovations may allow us to subvert the worst consequences? Might the rise of the remote DJ dance party be more than another form of entertainment but also a means of recreating Black spaces in our newly isolated society? Similarly, the emergence of the mask as a defining piece of personal protective equipment presents an opportunity for Afrofuturist fashion designers to fuse their inspiration and creativity with responsible public health behavior. Only months ago, few things sparked fear like a masked Black person. Now it is a symbol of safety, and support of science.

With regards to our efforts to rethink criminal justice and policing, the Afrofuturist says that we should rewire technological devices of control (literally and figuratively) to work in our favor. After all, Black Lives Matter and related hashtag activist movements are strikingly Afrofuturist: They utilize existing technology to amplify their signal and build coalitions. Even more, the use of cameras on mobile phones to record acts of violence is also Afrofuturist. Even though the cameras weren't designed to fuel civil disobedience, we wouldn't be having discussions about how to dismantle corrupt systems in law enforcement without them.

Similar things apply to the global fight against fascism. The Afrofuturist points to Generation Zoom's recent use of TikTok to embarrass a political campaign, as an example of the possibility for technology to facilitate creative protest.

These are radical notions, as technology is often weaponized at the expense of the disenfranchised. But Afrofuturism reminds us that Black culture in much of the world is a remix culture, and liberation emerges from the recombination between our artistic and political ambitions, and whatever tools are at our disposal. When we consider this, Afrofuturism predicts that the events of 2020 will breed new techno-political movements (as it already has), new artistic forms, means of expression, discoveries, and philosophies.

When considered in this light, Afrofuturism can even rescue the Afropessimists from their despair: Yes, some people will always suffer disproportionately from political ineptitude, negligence, and malevolence. But our imagination can offer a pathway for recovery in a post-comet world, and craft realities that are more just and colorful than the ones in your standard fictional utopias.
Photographs: Bettmann/Getty Images; Marvel Studios
WIRED Opinion publishes articles by outside contributors representing a wide range of viewpoints. Read more opinions here. Submit an op-ed at opinion@wired.com.

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The Year in Style 2016

Solange Knowles on "Saturday Night Live" in November, flaunting a sundial-size headdress of crystals and tight-woven braids. Credit... Dana Edelson/NBC, via Getty Images

In the September issue of W magazine, Rihanna was cast as Tomorrow, an otherworldly warrior queen and champion of the downtrodden, resplendent in diamonds and foil.

A month earlier, at the MTV Video Music Awards, Beyoncé projected a similarly astral vibe. Flanked on the stage by twin columns of attendants, she was a galactic goddess in a white ermine cape.

In November, on "Saturday Night Live," her sister, Solange Knowles, flaunted a sundial-size headdress of crystals and tight-woven braids, looking every inch a regal visitor from distant planet.

Each was in her way a beacon of Afrofuturism, a social, political and cultural genre that projects black space voyagers, warriors and their heroic like into a fantasy landscape, one that has long been the province of their mostly white counterparts.

[See more Year in Style articles]
Familiar to some, exotic to others, the term refers loosely to an unlikely fusion of parts: Egyptian and other non-Western mythologies, mysticism and magical realism with Afrocentricity, modern technology and science fiction. A freighted concept in more ways than one, it gained traction this year, muscling its way into the pop cultural mainstream via the intertwined worlds of entertainment, art and style.

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Rihanna, as an otherworldly warrior queen, in the September issue of W magazine. Credit... Steven Klein; styled by Edward Enninful

In part, Afrofuturism, an aesthetic dating roughly from the 1970s, has taken on a new public face through a new generation of recording artists - Erykah Badu, Missy Elliott and Janelle Monáe among them - who have given it not only a voice, but also a look. You will likely know it when you see it: a high-shine mash-up of cyborg themes, loosely tribal motifs, android imagery and gleaming metallics that might be appropriate for a voyage to Pluto's outer reaches.

Its latest incarnation seems timely, if not downright inevitable. "With the diversity of the nation and world increasingly standing in stark contrast to the diversity in futuristic works, it's no surprise that Afrofuturism emerged," writes Ytasha L. Womack, who chronicled and popularized the evolution of the genre in her 2013 book, " Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture."

"But when, even in the imaginary future," she goes on, "people can't fathom a person of non-Euro descent a hundred years into the future, a cosmic foot has to be put down."

The internet has lent the movement a force unknown in previous incarnations. A visual metaphor for empowerment on sites like the Afrofuturist Affair and influential Instagram accounts like Inkrayable_girafe, it permits black men and women to take charge of their image. Today, Ms. Womack writes, "a fledgling filmmaker can shoot his sci-fi web series on a $500 DV cam, post it on YouTube, and promote it on Instagram and Twitter."

Lina Iris Viktor, a British-Liberian artist in New York who paints queenly self-portraits with a futuristic edge, picked up the thread. "The internet democratized the playing field," she said. "Now the voices you hear are authentically ours. Instead of everybody else telling you stories, explaining to you what our work is about, we are telling you what it's about."

An Afrofuturist narrative is embedded as well in a recent flurry of museum shows. On view through November at El Museo del Barrio were the fashion illustrations of Antonio Lopez, a pioneer in the genre whose works of the '70s and '80s featured a multiracial cast of robotlike figures and astronauts propelled into a far-off Tomorrowland. It is a brave new world, as a review in The New York Times noted in June, "in which race and gender were fluid, and existing social inequities corrected or transcended."

Afrofuturism is a current in the multimedia installations of the artist Saya Woolfalk, whose utopian universes and Empathics, a future race fusing - and all but erasing - racial and ethnic boundaries, were featured this year in shows at the Brooklyn Museum, a light show in Times Square and, just this month, an installation at Art Basel Miami Beach.

Afrofuturist allusions crop up less overtly in the sprawling canvases of Kerry James Marshall, whose exhibition at the Met Breuer, through Jan. 29, includes idealized portraits of African-American Boy and Girl Scouts wreathed in halos of the kind often seen on comic-book heroes.

This summer, the movement flexed its muscle at the megaplex, where "Captain America: Civil War" featured the Black Panther (Chadwick Boseman), a superhero who in 2018 will star in "Black Panther" as the king and protector of the imaginary nation of Wakanda.

Afrofuturism's resurgence could not be more timely, arriving as it does in a climate perceived as indifferent, if not downright inimical, to racial and ethnic minorities. In her book, Ms. Womack recalls a time when black or brown sci-fi characters were all but invisible in the culture at large. As a girl, she would fantasize that she was Princess Leia of "Star Wars."

"While it was fun to be the chick from outer space in my imagination," Ms. Womack writes, "the quest to see myself or browner people in this space age, galactic epic was important to me." It was in the absence of minorities from pop lore, she goes on, "that seeds were planted in the imaginations of countless black kids who yearned to see themselves in warp-speed spaceship too."

Count among them Tim Fielder, a New York graphic artist and animator whose sci-fi illustrations, produced over a 30-year span, drew visitors last spring to " Black Metropolis," at the Gallatin Galleries at New York University. Mr. Fielder's pioneering cartoon narratives - notably those of " Matty's Rocket," his spirited black female cosmonaut, who will lift off next year in graphic novel form - are particularly relevant now, he maintained: "They let young artists know that they're not on dangerous turf, that someone has gone there before them."

Afrofuturism's epic imagery offers youth a mirror, Mr. Fielder said. "These kids are able now to see themselves in environments that are expansive, both technologically and in terms of social mores and gender," he said.

They also see themselves newly reflected in the comic books that remain a potent form of Afrofuturist expression. Last spring, the Black Panther, lately of "Captain America," was resurrected by Marvel as the noble protagonist of his own comic book series, written by Ta-Nehisi Coates, the author of "Between the World and Me." And this year, Riri Williams, an Afro-coiffured teenage superheroine with an M.I.T. degree, will slip into the fabled power suit in the "Iron Man" comic series.

Such vanguard characters can trace their genesis to early champions of Afrofuturism, paramount among them Sun Ra, the jazz composer, poet and philosopher who incorporated sci-fi themes into his music and his seminal film, "Space Is the Place," a mid-1970s tale of interplanetary time travel.

Afrofuturism owes as important a debt to the writer Octavia Butler, whose 1979 best-seller, "Kindred," posits an alternate reality in which an African-American heroine is transported from mid-70s Los Angeles to early 19th-century Maryland. It owes a debt as well to the music of George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic, with their prophetic lyrics in "Mothership Connection":

Time to move on

Light years in time

Ahead of our time.

Afrofuturist themes were revisited in the '90s, but still as a genre without a name until the cultural critic Mark Dery formally christened it in his 1994 essay "Black to the Future," after which it flourished for a time before retreating to the shadows.

Now the movement has returned in force, beamed down to the concert stage. Last month, the '70s disco diva Grace Jones, Afrofuturism's flat-topped mascot, toured in the British Isles, her stage persona, covered head-to-toe in tribal paint and feathers, a reprise of her hula-hoop-twirling performance at the Afropunk Fest in Brooklyn last year.

On a broadcast of "The Tonight Show" in February, the singer FKA Twigs seemed to alight from the clouds swathed in a incandescent white. Her costume, a-shimmer in crystals, was created with Grace Wales Bonner, a London designer whose work in the past has been rife with Afrofuturist allusions.

In her "Lemonade" album, released in April, Beyoncé reigns in an all-female utopia, leading a phalanx of women in ethereal white dresses that simultaneously conjure ancient and space-age societies.

The style world, too, has now embraced the movement, if only, perhaps, to reinforce its stature as an arbiter of cool. For the W September cover and 18-page editorial feature shot by Steven Klein, Rihanna's over-the-top costumes were cobbled from scratch.

"She's a one-off, a queen," said Edward Enninful, the magazine's fashion and style director. "A queen does not wear clothes off the runways." Instead she wears an otherworldly pastiche of vanguard creations by Gareth Pugh, Prada, Proenza Schouler and others, clothes conceived, Mr. Enninful said, to emphasize Rihanna's majestic persona.

"It's a look that many young black females out there haven't seen before," he said.

Riccardo Tisci of Givenchy was among the first to integrate Afrofuturist imagery into his runway shows. Two years earlier, he signed Ms. Badu as the fierce-looking face of the brand. Mr. Tisci followed up repeatedly, most recently with a fall 2016 line replete with cosmological symbols, including that familiar Afrofuturist talisman, the Egyptian Eye of Horus.

Calvin Klein released a fall advertising campaign starring the rapper Young Thug, dressed in flares and a fitted pinstripe chasuble, its neckline embellished with an astral-looking orb. A recent campaign from Chanel featured Willow Smith festooned in Afrofuturistic jewels.

The singer Willow Smith in a Chanel campaign, festooned in Afrofuturistic jewels.

Others are advancing this high-concept aesthetic in more subtle ways, thrusting aside clichés as they go. "Afrofuturism has to become something more than just an idea of black people in shiny metallic clothing," said Michelle Busayo Olupona, the Nigerian-American designer behind Busayo NYC, a label incorporating Afrofuturist themes in a stripped-down, abstract way. "In my own work, I try to create an aesthetic and style evocative of the past but very much grounded in the now."

Ms. Olupona said her abstract, Afrocentric designs, some incorporating fantasy fauna and futurist imagery, "suggest ways in which we can differentiate ourselves."

"What they say about the future," she continued, "is that we're always going to be here."

Another showcase for contemporary, less literal interpretations of Afrofuturism is 9J, a boutique and gallery recently sprung up on Bruckner Boulevard in the South Bronx. It aims to usher in the movement's next wave, with items like a ribbed trunk-neck sweater worthy of "Star Wars," created by a local designer Jesenia Lopez; gravity-defying Birkenstock platforms covered in feathers and Swarovski "gems"; and an outsize headdress of spiraling silver wire. These pieces mingle technology, fantasy and Afrocentric themes with a streamlined progressive-looking opulence.

The shop's owner, Jerome LaMaar, whose line, 5:31 Jérôme, has drawn high-visibility clients like Beyoncé and the model Hailey Baldwin, wore fur-rimmed virtual-reality goggles the other week while presiding at the opening of Africollision, an installation at 9J that eschewed the space-is-the-place hallmarks of old school Afrofuturism.

"We want to play with the idea of what is tribe, what is Africa, what is the future, and mix it all up without being predictable." Mr. LaMaar insisted. "Who wants to see what's already been done?"

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The Year in Style 2016 In the September issue of W magazine, Rihanna was cast as Tomorrow, an otherworldly warrior queen and champion of the downtrodden, resplendent in diamonds and foil. A month earlier, at the MTV Video Music Awards, Beyoncé projected a similarly astral vibe.