Imagine an industry where every single opponent worked in the same street, competing with each other by day—drinking, brawling, fornicating, night clubbing and cocaine-snorting with each other by night. A street full of the most ruthless and amoral people in the world existed, and it was called Fleet Street.Piers Morgan • Discussing his new Starz TV show, Fleet Street, a new dramatic series about his time working the tabloid journalism circuit in the ’70s. It’s a lot like working on ShortFormBlog now.
The dinosaur sequel, being directed by Colin Trevorrow, was due to begin production June 24 for a release date of June 13, 2014.
But on Wednesday the studio put the brakes on the project, deciding it needed more time for development.
While we don’t have much of an opinion on this news, we imagine there are more than a few Jurassic Park fans out there thrilled to hear that JP4 won’t be rushed to the silver screen.
Jason Richwine’s comments and general world view are a mark against the conservative community and against all fruitful discussions that would lead to comprehensive, bipartisan immigration reform.Rep. Ruben Hinojosa • Responding to a new Heritage Foundation study on the supposed costs of granting amnesty to illegal immigrants, which was co-authored by Robert Rector and Jason Richwine. The study is catching quite a bit of flack this week, thanks to WonkBlog’s unearthing of Richwine’s doctoral dissertation, which included the claim that “no one knows whether Hispanics will ever reach IQ parity with whites.” The Heritage Foundation has defended the accuracy of their latest study, telling The Hill that the dissertation was not commissioned by the Heritage Fondation, and that Richwine’s dissertation “in no way [reflects] the positions of The Heritage Foundation.” source
This is the secret to life.
Politicalprof: David Foster Wallace explains it all to you. Listen.
There is no way to overstate how much we recommend taking 10 minutes to watch this video.
The Making Of Macklemore | OUT
“Each night is different — you never know,” Macklemore says [of “Same Love”]. “To see 6,500 people put their hands up in support of equality is a beautiful thing. It’s honestly been the highlight of touring.”
Stacy wrote a feature for OUT Magazine on Macklemore and Ryan Lewis. “I knew I wanted to write a song about gay rights, about marriage equality, and about homophobia in hip-hop, but I didn’t know how to do it,” Macklemore says about the song, which eventually became a personal tale.
The Saul Bass Google Doodle is really good.
Watch this. When you hear companies talking about using “Flat Design,” what they really mean is “kinda like Saul Bass.”
Is one better? Is one worse? That’s entirely up to you. It all depends on what you think about Democrats versus Republicans, what constitutes fidelity and hypocrisy, how much you value physical contact vis-a-vis cheating, and whether you believe in comeuppance for raging egomaniacs. But one thing is clear: Comparing Mark Sanford to Anthony Weiner is like comparing apples and some fruit that tweets crotch pics when it’s bored. It’s just lazy. READ WHY HERE, FUN COLUMN.
From the column: ”Mark Sanford has much more in common with Bill Clinton, David Vitter, Eliot Spitzer and David Petraeus. Anthony Weiner’s story is more like that of Chris Lee, the shirtless Craigslist congressman. But because of the ‘comeback’ angle, because of the obsessive need for balance, we’re stuck referring to these men and what they did in the same breath.”
The search for Amanda Berry is over. For the past two days, excavating crews dug through an empty lot after receiving a tip from a convict who claimed he knew where the missing teen was buried.
Around 2:30 Friday afternoon, crews completed their search at a small lot on West 30th Street and Wade Avenue in Cleveland, but were not able to locate any remains.
Cleveland resident Pedro Castro said, “That’s a waste of money.”
Berry was found in the home of Castro’s brother Ariel, along with two other women. (via David Putney)
UPDATE: As was reported about a day after we posted this, Ariel Castro is the main suspect and his brothers were not charged as there is no evidence they were involved.
Former Gov. Mark #Sanford will fill the vacant U.S. House seat in South Carolina’s 1st Congressional District, CNN projects.
— CNN Breaking News (@cnnbrk) May 8, 2013
JUST IN: Former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford wins hotly contest U.S. House seat - AP
— NBC News (@NBCNews) May 8, 2013
Former Governor Mark Sanford is being projected as winner of the race for South Carolina’s first district House seat, defeating his Democratic opponent, Elizabeth Colbert Busch. Sanford, 52, was dogged by his infamous abandonment of his post as Governor in June of 2009, when he vanished to Argentina to engage in an extramarital affair. He ran on a very overt platform of redemption and asking forgiveness, however, and SC-1’s largely conservative voters seem to have been in a forgiving mood — Sanford is back from the Appalachian Trail, and he’s headed to the United States House.
Leaders in the technology community have every right to talk about how immigration reform will benefit their businesses. But instead, FWD.us has chosen a strategy that’s condescending to voters and counterproductive to the cause of reform.Former Sen. Russ Feingold • In a statement given to Politico, offering an explanation for why Progressives United, MoveOn.org, and other left-leaning organizations have decided to stop advertising on Facebook for at least two weeks. The advertising boycott is in response to several televised ads from FWD.us, the Mark Zuckerberg-founded advocacy organization which is supposedly focused on immigration reform, that support construction of the Keystone XL pipeline and attack “Obamacare.” source
Delaware just became the 11th state to pass marriage equality!
Same-sex marriage licenses will be available starting on June 1st, the result of a 12-9 state senate vote to codify marriage equality in the state of Delaware. Democratic Governor Jack Markell signed the bill just minutes after its legislative passage, bringing to a conclusion the tireless work of activists within the state.
Today brought some sad news from the entertainment world, as special effects pioneer Ray Harryhausen has died, aged 92. Harryhausen was, for a time, at the cutting edge of creature and monster effects in major motion pictures, long before computer generated images took so much of the tangible, numbing labor out of creating such imaginative realms. Harryhausen employed stop-motion photography to bring his creatures to life, a slow and exhaustive method demanding masterful dedication and devotion — both of which, his body of work clearly attests, he possessed in spades. source
kindofagiant:
Sure, let’s try a substantive critique. The woman on the left is talking to Nancy Grace, a major CNN Networks personality who once berated a woman on television just a few days before that woman committed suicide, then was forced to settle for $200,000 in a wrongful death suit. When asked if she felt sorry for what happened, she said of Melinda Duckett in the immediate wake of the news, “If anything, I would suggest that guilt made her commit suicide.” Despite this, Nancy Grace is still on the air seven years later, talking in the same parking lot as Ashleigh Banfield. If you had a job where you did that and had to settle over it, would you still be working there? Probably not. But Nancy Grace is still at HLN.
The problem with CNN is that they have lowered their standards significantly, thinking that a broad but unbiased approach will bring the ratings. (It hasn’t.) Moments like Howard Kurtz’s 15-minute mea culpa are so rare on the network these days that you have to cherish them as signs that a network that’s lost its way might find it again. It’s like they realized recently, hey, Twitter is faster than we are, and so maybe this breaking news thing isn’t quite as fun anymore. Let’s do another “lighter side of life” segment.
They don’t have a rudder anymore. For the first twenty years of their existence, they had a pretty good one: Covering news, being the first news outlet to report on a story, keeping the level of the conversation high. But sometime between 9/11 and now, something changed. They got sloppy. They blew two major stories within a year—first healthcare, then the Boston marathon suspect. For some reason, Fox News scared them a lot. And instead of deciding their mission was hard-hitting journalism, they decided they were more comfortable with “background visuals for airport terminals.” Their rudder could be BBC, American version. But instead it’s, The Weather Channel, but for news.
You may think that this is a stupid thing to make fun of, funny ha ha, oh they’re on split screens like this. But really, the reason this is coming up is because CNN has become so much about the spectacle—holograms, giant touch screens, never-ending cruise line sagas—that you can’t take them seriously, and moments like this bus moving by two anchors at the same time overshadow the news actually happening.
I snarked that this was “CNN’s problems, in animated GIF form,” and I stand by it. They were already seen as lightweight, but then they hired the fluffmeister himself. They’re so concerned with looking like a serious news outlet that they’d rather look the part by having split screens than actually focus on the kind of in-depth stuff that Al Jazeera English actually does. Do you think AJE’s producers are like “we must get our reporter on a split screen to make it look like we’re on the scene”? No. They’re at the big kids’ table, reporting the news.
That’s why this GIF represents CNN’s problems. Because while they were busy putting Nancy Grace on a split screen, they could have gotten someone other than Nancy Grace to talk about this story.