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The Decision

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Let us be decent and honorable and do what we can to spare Jason Collins the burdens of history. Let us be humane and not make of him the vehicle of our hopes for a better world. Let us be, for lack of a better word, Christian enough not to make out of Collins’s undeniably brave decision to announce that he is gay the vessel into which we pour enough of our own precious tolerance to admire ourselves in its reflection. Let’s not make him more of a symbol than he wants to be.

Click here for the full article at Grantland.

The Internet has reached peak hate. It had to. At every other moment in history when there has been an explosion of text — whether through social change, like the birth of a religious movement, or technological change, like the advent of print — a period of nasty struggle ensued before the forces of civility reined it in. In the past few months alone, we’ve seen the catfishing of Manti Te’o, a professional tennis player quit because of trolling, and a rash of teenage suicides from cyberbullying alongside the by-now-standard Twitter hatestorms of various strengths and durations. The sheer bulk of the rage at the moment can seem overwhelming. But the fact that we recognize it and have acknowledged its unacceptability is a sign of the ancient process reasserting itself yet again. The Internet is in the process of being civilized.Click the link for the full article: There Are No Saints Online (Esquire).
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The Internet has reached peak hate. It had to. At every other moment in history when there has been an explosion of text — whether through social change, like the birth of a religious movement, or technological change, like the advent of print — a period of nasty struggle ensued before the forces of civility reined it in. In the past few months alone, we’ve seen the catfishing of Manti Te’o, a professional tennis player quit because of trolling, and a rash of teenage suicides from cyberbullying alongside the by-now-standard Twitter hatestorms of various strengths and durations. The sheer bulk of the rage at the moment can seem overwhelming. But the fact that we recognize it and have acknowledged its unacceptability is a sign of the ancient process reasserting itself yet again. The Internet is in the process of being civilized.

Click the link for the full article: There Are No Saints Online (Esquire).

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How Disney Acquired Lucasfilm

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One weekend last October, Robert Iger, chief executive officer of Walt Disney (DIS), sat through all six Star Wars films. He’d seen them before, of course. This time, he took notes. Disney was in secret negotiations to acquire Lucasfilm, the company founded by Star Wars creator George Lucas, and Iger needed to do some due diligence.

The movies reacquainted Iger with Luke Skywalker, the questing Jedi Knight, and his nemesis Darth Vader, the Sith Lord who turns out to be (three-decade-old spoiler alert) his father. Beyond the movies, Iger needed to know Lucasfilm had a stockpile of similarly rich material—aka intellectual property—for more Star Wars installments. As any serious aficionado knows, there were always supposed to be nine. But how would Disney assess the value of an imaginary galaxy? What, for example, was its population?

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The People’s Critic

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Moviegoing is basically a passive pastime. You buy the ticket, head into the theater, sit, behold, and leave — happy, sad, mad, moved, amped up, let down, confused. The movies happen to you. But Roger Ebert, who died yesterday at 70, happened to the movies and, by extension, he happened to us. For a quarter of a century, he sat across from Gene Siskel and changed the act of moviegoing and popularized the art of movie criticism. He and Siskel started talking on television in 1975, the same year Jaws changed the art of popular moviemaking. How’s that for parallelism? Siskel and Ebert: both the great white shark and the Steven Spielberg of tastemaking.

Click here for full article by Wesley Morris at Grantland

Insert corny rap metaphor about blowjobs here.

Insert generic right-wing complaint on why the government needs to spend less here.

On Wednesday, President Barack Obama announced a $100 million dollar investment for an initiative that will attempt to further studies, as well as develop new technologies, in an attempt to understand and map how the billions of cells in the human brain interact.

The study is based on The Human Genome Project, an initiative that sought to, and was able to accomplish, mapping the three billion genomes in the human body. The project is titled the Human BRAIN Project, which is an acronym for Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies, a slightly disheartening and rather straightforward acronym.

During his speech announcing the investment, President Obama stated: “There is this enormous mystery waiting to be unlocked, and the BRAIN initiative will change that by giving scientists the tools they need to get a dynamic picture of the brain in action and better understand how we think and learn and remember. And that knowledge will be transformative.”

Click here for the full article at BBC

Click here to learn more about the Human Brain Project