Under Mounting Pressure, Apple Removes InfoWars Podcasts From iTunes

And Apple isn’t alone: “Apple has removed a number of podcasts created by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and his InfoWars site from the Podcasts app and iTunes store. The decision to remove the content comes as Facebook also censures Jones, un-publishing four of the radio host’s pages this morning for violating the social network’s rules against hate speech.”

Why Read Horror When The World Is So Horrifying On Its Own?

The world is horrible, but horror books and horror movies give us examples of people who fight back against the horror, and sometimes win: “The banal evils of the world — children shot, neighbors exiled, selves reframed in an instant as inhuman threats — these are horrible, but they aren’t horror. Horror promises that the plot arc will fall after it rises. Horror spins everyday evil to show its fantastical face, literalizing its corroded heart into something more dramatic, something easier to imagine facing down. Horror helps us name the original sins out of which horrible things are born.”

Something New On Screen: Strong, Flawed Women As The Focal Point Of Movies

Women are still massively underrepresented in movies, and no, that hasn’t statistically changed at all, sadly.”What is harder to define, but does seem like a genuinely positive trend, is a shift in the narratives of female-led biopics, a change in the kind of stories that get told. Previously, the main criterion for biopic treatment seemed to be a set of male genitalia, and failing that, royal blood or a singing career. The Hollywood approach suggested that women’s stories were more valuable if youth and beauty were key plot points. And for some reason, doomed and tragic tended to be an easier sell to financiers than difficult and complex. Now, bad behaviour is not just permitted, it’s positively encouraged.”

Dictionaries Are Hot On Twitter, But They’re Losing Their Meaning In A Non-Print Focused World

“We now live in a culture in which there are no clear distinctions between highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow culture. It stands to reason that in a society in which speaking in a recognizably ‘highbrow’ way confers no benefits, dictionaries will likely matter less.” There’s an exception, though: When the current U.S. president and his administration try to bend words to mean something they do not, dictionaries are striking back.