Companies that sell the social media mining software claim they’re trying to help prevent another Parkland – but a superintendent using the software gets alerts when family members post things about a school’s dress code. Useful or creepy, or both?
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No, Your Costco Card Can’t Be Used To Check Out Library Books (Yet)
And also, the circulation desk generally doesn’t have fake moustaches to check out. Or chalk. “How can you guys not have sidewalk chalk? This is the worst library!”
Asia Argento, One Of The Leaders Of The MeToo Movement, Paid A Settlement To Her Own Accuser
“In the months that followed her revelations about Mr. Weinstein last October, Ms. Argento quietly arranged to pay $380,000 to her own accuser: Jimmy Bennett, a young actor and rock musician who said she had sexually assaulted him in a California hotel room years earlier, when he was only two months past his 17th birthday. She was 37. The age of consent in California is 18.”
Asian Americans And Asians Say ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ Doesn’t Represent Everyone
And, says one columnist, that’s just fine: “We haven’t seen this many Asians with those many accents (Malaysian, American, Singaporean, British, Australian) being that many things ever before — sexy, funny and outrageous — and not doing martial arts. Or escaping war. Or being generally tragic.”
John Calder, An Independent British Publisher Who Fought Censorship, Has Died At 91
Calder published Eugène Ionesco, Marguerite Duras, Heinrich Böll, Samuel Beckett and nearly 20 other Nobel Prize winners. And he was against censorship: “In 1963, a few years after Penguin Books was acquitted of obscenity for publishing Lady Chatterley’s Lover in Britain, Mr. Calder acquired the rights to [Henry] Miller’s Tropic of Cancer — effectively daring the authorities to prosecute him under the British Obscene Publications Act of 1959.”
This Is How A Poetry-Reading Class Can Go Horribly Wrong
Close reading is hard, which is how this class ended up telling its professor that “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” was about a prostitute. “The predominant interpretation holds sway because students have been trained that their emotional response to a text is just as valid as, say, what it means to read a text within its historical or cultural context.”
The Push For A ‘GoldOpen’ For ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ Really Worked
It’s rare for a rom com to open at number one, but for a nonsequel comedy, the PG-13 movie posted the biggest opening weekend since last year’s Girls Trip, which featured four African American women and a star-making turn from Tiffany Haddish.
Oh Crap: Netflix Is Thinking Seriously About Adding Advertisements To Its Shows
Cries of “NO!” go up from millions of throats, but the streaming behemoth is probably going to do it anyway. As a matter of fact, it’s already in beta. “With increased competition from Hulu, though, Netflix has decided to begin testing out a new feature that brings its service more in line with what Hulu is offering. Netflix calls the new feature ‘recommendations,’ but we think a more catchy name would be ‘commercials.'”
Charles Blackman, Who ‘Painted All Our Dreams’ In Australia, Has Died At 90
The artist struggled with dementia for years, but never stopped drawing. “Blackman was part of a radical set of artists in post-war Melbourne who gained influence in the Australian art scene through the 1950s and 60s, largely through their rejection of the growing trend in abstraction and expressionism in art.”
The Literary Scene Is Popping In Bhutan
The country used to have a three percent literacy rate, and now it’s around 60 percent. “The number of bookshops is increasing; there are around a dozen in the capital, Thimphu, and a few more in far-flung districts. Bhutanese writers are publishing books more than ever before — fantasy novels, poetry, short story collections and especially folklore.” And then there’s the international literary festival.