It used to be the case that all hurricane names from 1953 to 1978 were female because hurricanes were ‘unpredictable’ just like women (!) but that kind of sexist stereotyping became unacceptable and they decided to alternate between male and female names.
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In an interview with NPR, new editor of the New York Times Dean Baquet regrets that the paper has previously sat on stories at the behest of the government. He acknowledges that this is what cost them the Snowden scoops that he says that he would have loved to have got.
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It is a given that Christianity is the most common religion across the US. But the Washington Post has a nice set of graphics that provide a state-by-state breakdown (and even down to the county level) of the second most popular religions, and there were some surprises.
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Los Angeles Times film critic Kenneth Turan also reviews films for NPR and in general I have found his recommendations to agree with my own tastes. So I was interested to hear a clip that he had published a new book where he recommends 54 films, starting from the 1920s until today, that he thinks that everyone should see. He feels that especially with older films, there are some gems that people today are not aware of.
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We tend to think that opposition within the Abrahamic religions to the teaching of evolution and sex education in schools is driven by Christians and Muslims, and that the Jewish religion is more flexible in its ability to interpret its scriptures and thus has no problems with either.
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The Daily Show has analyzed the trajectory of media coverage in the wake of mass shootings like the recent one in California and since such events have become so routine, has created a template that the media can use to quickly cover them.
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The conventional wisdom is that the Democrats are in for a shellacking in the 2014 elections, and likely to lose seats in the House of Representatives and even lose their majority in the Senate, leading to even greater gridlock in the next two years. But at the same time, the Republicans are advocating social and economic policies that are supposedly alienating women, minorities, the 99%, and the young.
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It turns out that Oliver Stone is set to make a film about Edward Snowden. Stone’s film is based on a book The Snowden Files by Guardian reporter Luke Harding. Stone is a fan of Snowden so the film will likely be sympathetic to him.
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On the anniversary of the publication of the first articles based on the revelations of Edward Snowden, we can expect to see a lot of retrospectives in the media about the past year and much has changed in that time.
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Today is the anniversary of the first news report based on the Edward Snowden documents and it is interesting to look back at how perceptions have changed over that time about Snowden and the journalists he used as a conduit for that information. A fascinating aspect has been the reactions of the so-called ‘liberal’ media because they got squeezed between the principle that transparency about how government works is always to be preferred and their desire to protect president Obama and his administration who have been revealed to be liars and law-breakers when is comes to spying on people.
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