Category: media

Another Civil War Alternative-History Series Is Coming: This Time, Freed Slaves Get Three States As Reparations

A couple of weeks ago, HBO announced a series called Confederate, depicting an independent 21st-century Confederacy (the South won) where slavery is still legal. (There’s been a lot of queasiness and worse about this project on social media, not least because the producers, the Game of Throines guys, are white, although the head writers are black.) Meanwhile, Amazon has been developing a series titled Black America, in which ex-slaves were given Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama and created the nation of New Colonia, which has been the United States’ neighbor and frenemy for 150 years.

Rule 34 In Action: Jon Ronson Visits The Booming World Of Made-To-Order Fetish Porn

There are condiments videos (a woman pouring tubs of mustard, ketchup, etc. over herself), flyswatting videos (a clothed woman swatting flies), drowning-rescue videos, a Wonder-Woman-attacked-by-a-gremlin video .. and then there’s the client referred to as Stamps Man. As Ronson tells a pair of custom producers, “You’re really on the coalface of the quirks of human sexuality.”

USC Study: Hollywood’s Huge Gender Imbalance, In Numbers

“At USC’s Viterbi School of Engineering Signal Analysis and Interpretation Lab (SAIL), Shrikanth Narayanan, the Niki and C.L. Max Nikias Chair in Engineering, and a team of researchers used automated software to analyze the sophistication of language and character interaction in nearly 1,000 scripts, poring over 53,000 dialogues between 7,000 characters. What they found was a whole lot of men — 4,900 male characters to 2,000 female characters — doing a whole lot of talking — men participated in 37,000, the women got only 15,000.”

Remember The Good Old Days When NPR Was Weird?

“In March of 1983, a listener would have clicked on the radio hoping to hear an update about Reagan’s plans for what the media was calling ‘Star Wars.’ Instead she would have heard the whoosh of tires, the voice of a hospital intern in North Carolina trying to figure out how to care about all his patients, the sound of a man taking swigs of whiskey as he drives to Florida to see his mom one last time before she dies, and the voice of Scott Carrier describing the light bounce of the red rocks of Arizona.”

Netflix Is Hugely Successful But $20 Billion In Debt. How Long Can This Go On?

Netflix has accumulated a hefty $20.54 billion in long- and short-term debt in its effort to produce more original content. The Los Gatos, Calif.-based company hopes more new shows will capture more subscribers, its primary revenue driver. It’s also under pressure to keep spending on new shows as streaming rivals such as Amazon and Hulu expand their own slates of original programming.

Former FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler On Net Neutrality, Monopolies And The Need For Regulation

“If the reality is that somewhere between 50% and 75% of all households in America have one or fewer choices for high-speed broadband–defined as 25 megabits per second–and 95% of all households in America have one or fewer choices for 100-mbps service, there is no competition. And when there is no competition, who makes the rules? The rules are made by the monopolists. So the job of the FCC should be to stand up and protect consumers and promote competition and innovation in a non-competitive market.”