Seeing Theory is a project from Brown University students using interactive visualizations to teach fundamental concepts of statistics, such as probability, linear regression, etc.

Statistics is quickly becoming the most important and multi-disciplinary field of mathematics. According to the American Statistical Association, “statistician” is one of the top ten fastest-growing occupations and statistics is one of the fastest-growing bachelor degrees. Statistical literacy is essential to our data driven society. Yet, for all the increased importance and demand for statistical competence, the pedagogical approaches in statistics have barely changed. Using Mike Bostock’s data visualization software, D3.js, Seeing Theory visualizes the fundamental concepts covered in an introductory college statistics or Advanced Placement statistics class. Students are encouraged to use Seeing Theory as an additional resource to their textbook, professor and peers.

Credito Emiliano is an Italian bank founded in 1910 with approximately 37 Billion EUR under asset. Some of those assets happen to be wheels of cheese from local farmers. From The New York Times, who first reported about this bank in 2009:

The bank considered taking prosciutto, another of the region’s specialties, and olive oil as collateral but such products were harder to store and brand, Mr. Bizzarri said. “It’s easier to steal or replace them,” he said.

Emilia-Romagna is the only area in the world legally allowed to use the parmigiano-reggiano name for the hard, dry, skim milk cheese that was first made in the region around 1200. Sales of parmesan totaled €1.54 billion in 2008, 25 percent from exports, according to the producers’ association.

Once the bank accepts cheese as collateral it oversees the aging process, which includes turning the wheels several times a week and checking periodically for cheeses that have gone soft. As a master tester taps each cheese with a small metal hammer, Mr. Bizzarri listens for hollow sounds that would indicate the wheel is a “dud” and result in its disposal.

Most wheels pass the test, said Mr. Bizzarri, who sold financial products and managed bank branches before taking over the cheese unit. After a year they are branded with the parmigiano-reggiano logo and serial numbers and tags.

When loans are not repaid, Credito Emiliano sells the cheese to recover its investment, returning any difference to the producer. This makes the operation low risk for the bank, Mr. Bizzarri said, adding that few producers defaulted.

I don’t think there’s any food items in the U.S. that would be viewed in the same way — possibly wine? — but certainly in Spain — jamon iberico, for example — this could be possible.

A prescient reminder from The New Yorker’s Moira Weigel:

“The Handmaid’s Tale” ’s most chilling resonance, though, comes from its vision of a society that compels women to keep reproducing even when it’s become increasingly difficult for them to do so. In the America of 2017, as in Gilead, birth rates are falling, not because of mysterious toxins in the air but because many Americans cannot imagine being able to afford children. Instead of Handmaids, the women most likely to be capable of becoming pregnant are twentysomethings trying to pay off student loans with wages from precarious jobs. (I recently heard one young woman say that she felt “sterilized by student debt.”) Others are barren not because of an ecological disaster but because they have worked straight through their childbearing years. Meanwhile, Republicans of today, like those of the Reagan era, continue to push to further privatize the resources that might support childbearing and child-rearing. Consider the remarkable question, posed recently by the Illinois congressman John Shimkus, of why men should subsidize prenatal care.

Only three episodes in, it already feels like Hulu’s “Handmaid’s Tale” is the most important TV show of 2017. It is an essential watch if for nothing else than to get people to read Margaret Atwood’s astonishing work of speculative fiction — one that becomes less speculative as the years go by.

FWIW’s Elisabeth Moss’s performance as Offred is one for the ages. Elsewhere: this long profile about Moss and Handmaid in Vulture is worth checking out, too.

Please allow me to reintroduce myself. It’s been nearly 2.5 years and I’ve got a slow growing itch bubbling inside.

You know the show has secretly been not that great since season two. It’s the giant elephant in the estate. Anyway, this pretty summed up my feelings on the matter: “Mr. Carson is pooping on about Downton ‘catching up with the times.’ Someone should tell him that in less than 100 years everyone is going to have handheld devices that will be able to display internet porn and cat videos at the touch of a screen.”

That said, I’m still going to watch when it drops. September 21st in the UK (ahem, torrents for those in the US, ahem) or January on PBS stateside.

Charles Pierce writing for Grantland:

Because of these obscure common origins, as far as I know, there is no other game that is played so many different ways that is nonetheless called the same thing. “Football” means Ronaldo in Lisbon, Peyton Manning in Denver, and James O’Donoghue in Killarney. All of them have different skills, and they play different games with the same name.

What each flavor has in common is spectacle. So many of the other sports seem to be relatively private and intimate. The various forms of “football” are bright and brash and, when they are played at their highest levels in the countries that love them, they blot out the sun on the sports landscape. It is this ability to create spectacle that accounts for the way the several kinds of “football” are able to engender similar forms of occasionally lunatic jingoism. There is a barely hidden element of violence to them. They all involve varying degrees of physical contact. They all involve, in one way or another, one human being knocking another one to the ground. There is a tacit understanding that all of them are a polite sublimation of the tendency of countries to make war on each other. This is not unusual in history. The early Jesuit missionaries to the New World noted that Native American tribes used three-day lacrosse games, which occasionally were contested with hundreds of players on either side, as barely disguised battles, played as a tribute to what they called “the Creator.” Mess with “football” and, as Ned Beatty says in Network, you are messing with the fundamental forces of nature and a vaguely religious concept of nationhood.

Right now, as all of its seasons at all levels are just beginning, American football is under unprecedented assault. Science is providing more and more evidence that the game is physically perilous to everyone who plays it. This forces a series of hard decisions on the participants and moral questions on the devotees. Is it ethical, or even humane, to be entertained for fun and (occasionally) profit by a sport that so inevitably destroys the people who play it? (Steve Almond’s recently released book, Against Football, poses these questions very directly.) There are only two possible approaches to these issues. You can answer them honestly, or you can duck them entirely. And the latter approach often involves cloaking yourself in the almost theological tribalism that American football shares with all the other varieties.

Think about the defenses of American football that rely on “tradition” as an argument opposing the moral case against the game. Think about how closely American football has attached itself to the U.S. military, from the in-game commercials to the now-customary flyovers of attack aircraft. Think about the 2011 Super Bowl, in which we had “God Bless America” and the National Anthem, a flyover, and a bizarre video that sought to link John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address, Martin Luther King’s speech on the National Mall, and Ali’s KO of Liston in Lewiston, Maine. Think about the way football is positioned as some kind of essentially American journey. Patriotism may be the last refuge of scoundrels, but it’s also a handy hideout for huge corporate athletic enterprises that are facing existential questions about what they do to the athletes who engage in them.

But that may be enough to help American football to survive.

Neat project, but cooler architect to keep an eye on: “It shouldn’t come as any surprise that Bjarke Ingels would respond to an invitation from the National Building Museum with a design for a maze. The architect is known for his whimsy. When Copenhagen decided on building a waste incinerator in the city, the city turned to Ingels to create a design that would make the facility more palatable to residents; he designed the Amagerforbraending waste incinerator as a functional ski slope, one that emits exhaust (essentially water vapor) in periodic, puffy smoke rings. For another Copenhagen project, the Superkilen urban park, Bjarke Ingels Group imported signage, structures, and public design objects from all over the world, making it a sort of global, comical fair ground.”

Or, why you (and me) just realized you are one of the olds.

Led Zeppelin is classic rock. So are Mötley Crüe and Ozzy Osbourne. But what about U2 or Nirvana? As a child of the 1990s, I never doubted that any of these bands were classic rock, even though it may be shocking for many to hear. And then I heard Green Day’s “American Idiot” on a classic rock station a few weeks ago, and I was shocked.

It was my first time hearing a band I grew up with referred to as “classic rock.” Almost anyone who listens to music over a long enough period of time probably experiences this moment — my colleagues related some of their own, like hearing R.E.M. or Guns N’ Roses on a classic rock station — but it made me wonder, what precisely is classic rock? As it turns out, a massive amount of data collection and analysis, and some algorithms, go into figuring out the answer to that very question.

FiveThirtyEight breaks down the math of what exactly defines a musical act as “classic rock”.

The only big change I would make is swapping out Netflix’s ‘House of Cards’ (awful season two and on notice) for Showtime’s ‘Masters of Sex’ in the best drama category. Regardless, stick a fork in the broadcasters when it comes to television that matters.

For Justice Kagan, 35 ft. on a tape measure might seem like a lot. But I have a slightly different perspective, one that is far more personal and relevant to this particular issue.

In 2010, my wife and I went to a Brookline, Mass., abortion clinic after a team of renowned Boston doctors diagnosed our 16-week-old unborn baby with Sirenomelia. Our baby’s legs were fused together, but that wasn’t the worst of it. The baby had no kidneys, no bladder and no anus. We were given the heartbreaking news that there was a 0% chance of a live birth.

Because my wife’s health wasn’t in immediate danger, the hospital couldn’t get her in for a termination for two weeks. However, that meant it’d be a 50/50 chance of being able to have an abortion or having to deliver a stillborn. After much soul searching and contemplating a no-win scenario, my wife decided a stillbirth was more than she could handle and so the hospital sent us to a recommended clinic to perform an abortion.

When we pulled into the parking lot and got out of our car, the saddest day of our lives got exponentially worse.

These issues are a lot more complex when we consider the actually human toll on something as whether or not a 35ft. buffer zone outside a women’s health clinic is constitutionally legal or whether it impugns someone’s free speech rights. Empathy is something this country needs more of.

I’m just absurdly giddy that this film is only a month away. Everything about this trailer is expertly played. It’s fun, the stakes are clear, the character moments all shine. It’s a perfect piece of movie marketing. [via cinemablend]

“Well, yaw cum raht in,” he chirped excitedly. “I’ll git mah whife, and we’ll set us down and have us a rail nahce vis-i-ta-shun.”

Say what?

Six months earlier, I had moved to Brazil to work as a fledgling editor for an English-language newspaper in São Paulo, a sort of International Herald Tribune for Latin America. One Saturday morning with nothing much to do, more out of distraction than purpose, I bought a bus ticket to a city ninety miles away called Americana. I had heard somewhere about Americana being settled by disgruntled American Confederates after their side lost the Civil War, and somehow descendants of the original settlers still lived there and still spoke the English of the American South circa 1865.

Surely, that account was more science fiction than real. It had to be. But little did I realize at the time, I had stumbled onto a yarn so fantastic and bizarre it could have been spun out of The Twilight Zone.

Crazy bit of history.

Here’s Bill about visiting a hospital on Soweto, South Africa:

This was hell with a waiting list.

But seeing hell didn’t reduce my optimism; it channeled it. I got in the car and told the doctor who was working with us: “Yeah, I know. MDR-TB is hard to cure. But we should be able to do something for these people.” This year, we’re entering phase three with a new TB drug regime. For patients who respond, instead of a 50 percent cure rate after 18 months for $2,000, we could get an 80-90 percent cure rate after six months for under $100.

That’s better by a factor of a hundred.

Optimism is often dismissed as false hope. But there is also false hopelessness.

That’s the attitude that says we can’t defeat poverty and disease.

We absolutely can.

Here’s Melinda:

Let your heart break. It will change what you do with your optimism. […] As you leave Stanford, take your genius and your optimism and your empathy and go change the world in ways that will make millions of others optimistic as well.

You don’t have to rush. You have careers to launch, debts to pay, spouses to meet and marry. That’s enough for now.

But in the course of your lives, without any plan on your part, you’ll come to see suffering that will break your heart.

When it happens, and it will, don’t turn away from it; turn toward it.

That is the moment when change is born.

Yes, yes, yes. A thousands times yes. Read this, bookmark it for later, and then get this speech tattooed on your back. [via 512pixels]

But the big impact is financial. Gone are a distributor’s financial guarantees, which in the case of “This American Life,” reached seven figures. Instead, Mr. Glass will now be responsible for the show’s marketing and distribution, as well as for finding corporate sponsors. It’s the equivalent of Radiohead’s releasing its own album “In Rainbows,” or Louis C. K.’s selling his own stand-up special — except all the time, for every show. It’s the kind of move that can signal radical changes in the public radio firmament, with National Public Radio and other distributors wondering who, if anyone, may follow suit, and whether Mr. Glass will return if he fails.

For listeners, there will be no difference. If anyone on radio has the audience to pull this off it would be Glass. And, hey, if he fails, public radio will happily agree to distribute again.

Jerome Thelia:

As soon as I saw a photograph of an African soccer ball, stitched together from old rags in the geometric patterns so familiar to us, I wanted to tell its story.

And so last July my filmmaking crew traveled to a village outside of Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where we shot this Op-Doc. Although the country did not qualify for the World Cup, people there – as in most of Africa – are mad about soccer. They play it everywhere. And because soccer balls like the ones common on American fields are a rarity in much of Africa, the sport is often played with homemade balls, like the one in this video.

The country has lost more than five million people to an intractable conflict that has terrorized the region for nearly two decades. Despite living through one of the world’s most brutal wars, children there still play with passion and joy – regardless of what kind of ball they are using.

We are now preparing to head to the World Cup in Brazil, where we’ll film a very different ball in a very different setting. Yet the joy of playing the game is universal.

Full disclosure: This clip comes from a new documentary, ‘Bounce: How the Ball Taught the World to Play’ that my co-worker, John Fox, is putting together. It’s based on his book, ‘The Ball: Discovering the Object of the Game‘.

With its paint-by-numbers plotting and open acknowledgment that nothing onscreen makes sense (everyone thinks the cops are too old to pass for college dudes, and Schmidt’s girlfriend’s roommate, a witheringly sarcastic young woman played by Jillian Bell, demands that Schmidt “tell us about the war, any of them”), “22 Jump Street” is the sort of film that the Lego guy might watch alone in his nondescript little Lego apartment while eating Lego snacks from a Lego bowl and smiling desperately. But instead of being bored with itself, the film is lively, at times ecstatically silly. It has some of the greatest split-screen gags I’ve seen—the best of which, an extended drug trip, is “Duck Amuck” sublime—and even when it’s not highlighting its movie-ness, your mind is racing to predict what clichés it’ll skewer/indulge next. The final credits sequence listing all the sequels that the “Jump Street” team will make in the future feels like Lord and Miller’s way of telling wisecracking viewers, “Don’t try to out-funny us, because there’s no joke you can make that we aren’t making already, and besides, none of them were that clever to start with.” The movie is post-entertainment entertainment. The joke’s on everyone.

The first is Amazon and how they are scrubbing Hatchette Books from existence to extract more favorable terms:

Amazon, under fire in much of the literary community for energetically discouraging customers from buying books from the publisher Hachette, has abruptly escalated the battle.

The retailer began refusing orders late Thursday for coming Hachette books, including J.K. Rowling’s new novel. The paperback edition of Brad Stone’s “The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon” — a book Amazon disliked so much it denounced it — is suddenly listed as “unavailable.”

In some cases, even the pages promoting the books have disappeared.

Which, Farhad Manjoo puts into proper perspective as the worst possible outcome for Amazon customers:

f it doesn’t already, Amazon may soon control a monopolistic stake of the e-book market and its tactics are sure to invite not only scorn from the book industry but also increased regulatory oversight.

But the more basic problem here is that Amazon is violating its own code. To win a corporate battle, Amazon is ruining its customer experience. Mr. Bezos has long pointed to customer satisfaction as his North Star; making sure customers are treated well is the guiding principle for how he runs Amazon.

Now Amazon is raising prices, removing ordering buttons, lengthening shipping times and monkeying with recommendation algorithms. Do these sound like the moves of a man who cares about customers above all else?

And then there’s the saga of Matt Haughey attempting to save his influential and popular community aggregating site, MetaFilter (think of it as Reddit for people with taste), from going under.

As Winter 2012 became Spring 2013, traffic remained flat and we all took big pay cuts to make ends meet. Google sunsetted their beta program MetaFilter was in and we went back to the standard Google Adsense ads which did pretty well and revenue improved a bit. Over the course of 2013, a series of messages from the Adsense team hit me with varying degrees of severity. We were temporarily banned from the system due to some text questions talking about sexual health (questions from users that include terms for body parts etc., but Google interprets that as the site being “adult”) and had to greatly beef up our ad display blocking by subject matter. Late last year, I was told that despite the past decade of Google’s Adsense pages suggesting ads should match your site, different background colors were now required to better discern ads from content, resulting in another large decrease.

For the last year and a half, MetaFilter’s revenues have continued to decrease and traffic has slipped a bit as well. Additionally, mobile web traffic has grown substantially (especially at certain times: nights and weekends we see 60-70% of all traffic on mobile/tablet) and ad performance on mobile is much less effective, where mobile pages only make about 1/3 to 1/10th as much as a desktop page. On average, every 3-6 months for the past year and a half we’ve seen additional ~20% drop-offs in traffic and revenue, and that’s been a challenge to deal with.

MetaFilter basically depends on Google search for traffic and Google ad revenues to fund its business and both have mysteriously gone away, which Google won’t share. Or, as Marco Ament points out:

Google owns the ad-driven web: their search brings all of your pageviews, and their ads bring all of your income. You’re just along for the ride, hoping to stay in Google’s good graces — an arbitrary, unreliable, undocumented metric that changes constantly. (Google’s only “open” with the trivial, unprofitable parts of their business. Search and ads are closed, proprietary, and opaque in every possible way.)

Those that produce content on the web have largely been reduced to do so for free to drive the business agendas of large technology companies. It’s increasingly the same way with Facebook brand pages and will probably be that way on Twitter.

Pay to play is one of the oldest business schemes in the world. It worked for the mafia, drug cartels and it also works for technology companies.

I have lost all concept of the relative popularity of bands. It used to be easy. All you’d have to do is see which bands had chart-topping hits and which albums were selling hundreds of thousands of albums a week. Now? Now, I have no idea and I’m constantly surprised.

Any given week I typically have the following reaction: wait, the Black Keys have reached arena status? When the fuck did that happen? Some bands you think are huge play small clubs and vice versa. It is nearly impossible to figure out the music industry hierarchy anymore.

Priceonomics recently published a very long, leaked list of the fees some of the world’s favorite bands and pop stars charge for a concert appearance. The list comes from a third-party booking agency, Degy Entertainment, which specializes in booking college shows and so while the list might not be entirely accurate it does, finally, paint a relative picture of which bands are more popular than others.

Why does this sort of thing matter? Ultimately, it doesn’t. But it is interesting for music nerds.

It’s something I think about constantly while watching ‘Nashville’, for instance. How does Juliette Barnes’ popularity compare to Taylor Swift? Is Rayna James on the same level as Faith Hill or is she more like a slightly more popular Neko Case? The show never really addresses these comparisons and why it’s so important for Juliette Barnes to need the good graces of the Nashville industry when she could just move to LA or Austin or Portland especially if she were Taylor Swift popular and not Carrie Underwood popular.

Fuck. “Marvel and Edgar Wright jointly announced today that the studio and director have parted ways on ANT-MAN due to differences in their vision of the film. The decision to move on is amicable and does not impact the release date on July 17, 2015. A new director will be announced shortly.”

Wright was a large part of the reason this project was so exciting. It’s too bad Marvel seems to be walking back on its efforts to hire interesting filmmakers with distinctive voices to direct their movies. That was one of the things the studio seemed to do right.

As Devin Faraci says, “Good luck to whoever they hire to Brett Ratner this one.”

Look, you might not be excited for this one, but I sure as shit can’t wait for August to roll around. It’s also worth thinking about this movie in relation to this list about Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD TV show, which just wrapped its first season with a string of strong narrative episodes born out of the big reveal for Captain America 2. The article hints that the show’s season two direction will have strong ties to GotG. [via latimes]

On May 10, Brazilian artist Paulo Ito posted this mural on the doors of a schoolhouse in São Paulo’s Pompeia district. Less than a week later, it has become an international sensation, drawing huge attention on Facebook. It has also taken off in Brazil—a post on the popular Facebook page TV Revolta has been shared and liked more than 40,000 times.*

I first saw the image when The Nation’s Dave Zirin posted it on Twitter. The portrait of a weeping, starving Brazilian child with nothing to eat but a soccer ball is so simple and evocative that you don’t need to know much about Brazil to wrap your head around it. All you have to understand is that despite massive gains made over the past decade, poverty levels are still appallingly high, and the World Cup is costing the nation billions of dollars that could be spent elsewhere.

“People already have the feeling and that image condensed this feeling,” the São Paulo-based Ito told me in an interview today. He says he’s never created anything so popular in his 14 years as a street artist, and was surprised by the powerful response. “The truth is there is so much wrong in Brazil that it is difficult to know where to start,” he explained via Facebook chat. “I didn’t mean [to say] nobody is doing anything against poverty,” he said of the mural. “But we need to show the world or ourselves that the situation is still not good.”

When we stopped at the first red light after leaving the hospital, I broke two of my most important marital promises. I started acting like my wife’s doctor, and I lied to her.

I had just taken the PET scan, the diagnostic X-ray test, out of its manila envelope. Raising the films up even to the low light overhead was enough for me to see what was happening inside her body. But when we drove on, I said, “I can’t tell; I can’t get my orientation. We have to wait to hear from your oncologist back home.” I’m a lung doctor, not an expert in these films, I feigned. But I had seen in an instant that the cancer had spread.

PET scans are like that, radioactive tracers that travel around the body and measure how much work different cells are doing. And cancer cells are very active workers. The scans are like the ground seen from the air at night. When there is no cancer they look like Idaho, all quiet. Really bad news looks like downtown Chicago or Phoenix.

It was a warm night for early June, the beginning of the winter in Argentina. People crowded the sidewalks, returning from work, stopping for dinner. All the everyday stuff that fills our lives, neither adding particular meaning or taking it away. We pulled into the garage with the narrow entrance; our tires squeaked on the newly painted floor. Ruth was silent. I was silent. I knew. She didn’t.

Actually, she probably did.

My wife was dead eight months later. We were back in New York. In our home. During our winter.

One night last February, Welsh watched a bit of TV, then sacked out for the night. Someone entered Welsh’s home in the middle of the night and brutally murdered him to death. It remains the only unsolved murder in Montgomery County, Maryland this year.

The Washington Post has a story that serves as both a touching profile about Welsh’s life of quiet solitude and a look at modern police forensics that relies so heavily on our electronic breadcrumbs to solve crimes.

“Detectives have tried to piece together the final weeks of Philip’s life by talking to those who were close to him. And it is not just the dearth of electronic records that present a challenge. Detectives have found no enemies of Philip and very little physical evidence. They declined to say how he was killed — only that it was from blunt force trauma — out of caution that doing so could compromise the investigation. Jones, the police captain, said he does not think the case was random. ‘We’re still pounding, and we’re still talking to people,’ he said. ‘It’s frustrating.'”

A strange peak into modern police investigations that aren’t quite yet CSI but do rely on more than just pounding the pavement.

This five-minute extended trailer for the Flash TV show, a spinoff of The CW’s ‘Arrow’ is essentially the pilot episode condensed to the broad strokes. But, boy, does this look like it’ll make a nice companion piece to Arrow.

Compare this to the recently released trailer for Fox’s ‘Gotham’, which feels like an unnecessary prequel to the Batman saga. It feels calculating in a really depressing, pandering sort of way.

Anyway, back to The Flash. Seeing Barry Allen and Ollie Queen on the small screen together makes me wish we could get a guest appearance from the Superman of Smallville and have them build toward a Justice League. Flash looks fun and if it can be half as good as Arrow (one of the best shows on tv period) then comic book fans will be in for a treat. [via io9]

They surely feel confident about the look of Ben Affleck’s Batman suit, and it is a nice homage to the Frank Miller short cowl. If I had to guess: producers will eventually reveal this to be the grey/navy blue incarnation of the suit — a first given Batman has always had a black suit in the movies.

Snyder’s ‘Man of Steel’ is less good in hindsight. Not even Affleck incredibly looking the part of Batman can make me feel anything other than cautious optimism for this one. I wasn’t worried when Affleck was cast as Batman and I’m certainly not worried about him not. What does concern me is Snyder and Warner Brothers. I want this movie to not suck so hard.

The sad thing is, aside from Dick Cheney’s kill squad, most of the things the Atlantic claims “the end of” are doing just fine, like men, women, cats, candy, property, and the iPhone. It’s almost as obnoxious a linkbait tactic as the common listicle or quiz.

Make no mistake: Donald Sterling is the villain of this story. But he’s just a handmaiden to the bigger evil. In our quest for social justice, we shouldn’t lose sight that racism is the true enemy. He’s just another jerk with more money than brains.

So, if we’re all going to be outraged, let’s be outraged that we weren’t more outraged when his racism was first evident. Let’s be outraged that private conversations between people in an intimate relationship are recorded and publicly played. Let’s be outraged that whoever did the betraying will probably get a book deal, a sitcom, trade recipes with Hoda and Kathie Lee, and soon appear on Celebrity Apprentice and Dancing with the Stars.

The big question is “What should be done next?” I hope Sterling loses his franchise. I hope whoever made this illegal tape is sent to prison. I hope the Clippers continue to be unconditionally supported by their fans. I hope the Clippers realize that the ramblings of an 80-year-old man jealous of his young girlfriend don’t define who they are as individual players or as a team. They aren’t playing for Sterling—they’re playing for themselves, for the fans, for showing the world that neither basketball, nor our American ideals, are defined by a few pathetic men or women.

Let’s use this tawdry incident to remind ourselves of the old saying: “Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom.” Instead of being content to punish Sterling and go back to sleep, we need to be inspired to vigilantly seek out, expose, and eliminate racism at its first signs.

As my friend Brian Lindenmuth said: “Kareem Abdul Jabbar writes a column, I read it. That simple whether he’s writing about Girls or Donald Sterling. Love this guy.”

Here here.

Abdul-Jabbar is the only person asking why this particular moment has galvanized the smoking gun toward Sterling, who has always been reprehensible, but only now are people faking outrage over Sterling’s actions.

I believe that I have maintained an active sense of wonder as I’ve gotten older, and part of that is a choice I made long ago as a film fan. Every time I walk into the theater, I am rooting for the filmmaker. I want to start from the position of loving movies, not from a soured stance of demanding that each and every film dazzle me all over again. What gets me to turn on a movie is when I see someone who is given every resource they would ever need and then some, and they make something that doesn’t even try. That is infuriating. When I see studios play it safe, that is infuriating. When I see filmmakers who seem to have just given up and taken the path of least resistance, that is infuriating.

Because if we do live in an age of casual magic, then we should recognize this as a gift, not a curse. Instead of lamenting about how much has been done and retreating into endless imitation and repetition, how about we take this as a challenge to expand what we can imagine?

We don’t need to see anyone else tell us a Campbell-style hero’s journey story, and we don’t need more origin stories and we don’t need a prequel to every other film already in existence. We don’t. What we need are people who look at the tools available to them who say, “There are things we have never tried that we can finally try, and I want to be first.” We need filmmakers who take these tools and push them so far, who try such unexpected new things with them that they end up having to create new tools just to get there.

What he’s scratching at is that visual effects work is so easy to add to a movie that it has almost overwhelmed them — especially when it comes to summer blockbusters. The story serves the explosions not the other way around. To me, that’s why ‘Gravity’ and the recent ‘Captain American’ resonated so, because everything served the story.

Anyway, McWeeny really scratches at something that’s front of mind for a lot of movie goers these days — especially genre fans.

The Star Wars team is thrilled to announce the cast of Star Wars: Episode VII.

Actors John Boyega, Daisy Ridley, Adam Driver, Oscar Isaac, Andy Serkis, Domhnall Gleeson, and Max von Sydow will join the original stars of the saga, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, Mark Hamill, Anthony Daniels, Peter Mayhew, and Kenny Baker in the new film.

Director J.J. Abrams says, “We are so excited to finally share the cast of Star Wars: Episode VII. It is both thrilling and surreal to watch the beloved original cast and these brilliant new performers come together to bring this world to life, once again. We start shooting in a couple of weeks, and everyone is doing their best to make the fans proud.”

Star Wars: Episode VII is being directed by J.J. Abrams from a screenplay by Lawrence Kasdan and Abrams. Kathleen Kennedy, J.J. Abrams, and Bryan Burk are producing, and John Williams returns as the composer. The movie opens worldwide on December 18, 2015.

First thing to note is how sensational this cast is, if completely unexpected. Also, the first cast was excited for Episode I and remember how that turned out. For those wondering who the above kids are, io9 as a quick rundown:

1. John Boyega, bad ass lead in Attack the Block. He killed all the alien baddies, and acted the hell out of the movie. Really excited to get him.
2. Daisy Ridley. Fairly new face here. First real gripe of the casting list too. ONLY ONE FEMALE?
3. Adam Driver, you may know him as Lena Dunham’s on screen boyfriend from Girls. Driver has long been rumored to be in this film, as the villain.
4. Oscar Isaac, Inside Llewyn Davis. Wonderful, maybe he will sing?
5. Andy Serkis. Playing Andy Serkis or using his skills at performance capture as some sort of Star Wars creature. Win, win either way.
6. Domhnall Gleeson, lead in About Time. Also seen in True Gritt, Dredd, Harry Potter he’s great. This actor has a wide range of acting abilities.
7. Max von Sydow, you know who Max von Sydow is.
8. And, of course, the original trio.

The biggest question seems to be whether Serkis will be playing a mocap character or playing himself. Obviously, you don’t get Serkis unless you need him to crush a mocap character playing a pivotal role in the film. Also, I can easily see the younger characters being the kids of the original trilogy cast.

Boyega, Driver, Isaac, and Gleeson are all really interesting casting choices that will hopefully pay off with strong material.

According to urban legend, a massive stockpile of Atari gear — including truckloads of the notoriously awful game E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial — has laid buried in a New Mexico landfill for over thirty years. Today, that story is no longer a myth. Construction crews have uncovered copies of the Atari 2600 game at a landfill deep in the New Mexico desert, near the city of Alamogordo.

Back during the so-called video game crash of 1983, a struggling Atari was stuck with truckloads of the game and other unsold hardware. With little recourse and a crashing interest in video games in North America, the company decided to dump its excess merchandise into a landfill, according to reports at the time. The story was never confirmed, however, and it’s carried on as a legendary tale from a time when video games were near worthless. It reportedly cost Atari millions to get the rights to produce a video game tie-in to the incredibly successful Steven Spielberg film, but the resulting E.T. game was a massive flop and it’s considered one of the worst titles of all time.

Or, just go fuck yourself. It’s toast. You put bread in a toaster oven and then smoother it with either butter, peanut butter, or jam. Pick one, or two, but never all three at once and never anything other than those three options. No toaster oven equals no toast.

I in awe of Pacific Standard Magazine’s profile of Giulietta Carrelli, founder of San Francisco’s Trouble Coffee & Coconut Club and probably responsible for the artisanal toast craze, as much as the next hipster, journalist, blogger, gadfly person sitting in front of their computer, but let’s not over-think this shit, shall we NPR?