Jynell Greenfield

Apple introduced a bunch of new features for people with disabilities. In addition, Apple is offering on-demand sign language interpreters for video customer support. The new assistive touch gestures for the Apple Watch are amazing. You can control the watch by tapping your finger and thumb together and clenching your fist.

A batch of internal emails and other communications by Boeing employees were released to Congress on Thursday as part of a 100-plus page document, according to CNN, and what these employees said about Boeing’s 737 Max back in 2017 and 2018 is terrifying. (It wasn’t even a year after these communications that two new 737 Max planes crashed within five months of each other, killing 346 people total.)

For example, in April 2017, one employee said the Max was “designed by clowns, who in turn are supervised by monkeys,” and referred to the plane as having a “piss poor design.”

And in February 2018, from one employee to another: "Honesty is the only way in this job — integrity when lives are on the line on the aircraft and training programs shouldn't be taken with a pinch of salt. Would you put your family on a Max simulator trained aircraft? I wouldn't."

To which the other employee said, “No.”

Three months later, an employee wrote about some other mishap Boeing was dealing with: "I really would struggle to defend the [simulator] in front of the FAA next week,” while another employee wrote: “I still haven't been forgiven by god for the covering up I did last year."

From CNN:

The new jet was intended to be similar enough to require only the tablet-based training to bring pilots up to speed on the differences between the old model and the new one. One email included in Thursday's collection of documents from Boeing's chief technical pilot made it clear how crucial it was to the company that the simulator not be required.

"I want to stress the importance of holding firm that there will not be any type of simulator training required to transition" to the Max, the person wrote to Boeing employees in March 2017. "Boeing will not allow that to happen. We'll go face to face with any regulator who tries to make that a requirement."

But neither the Max training nor the flight manual disclosed the existence of a stabilization system known as MCAS, which was designed to operate in the background so that the Max, with larger engines and different aerodynamics, would fly similarly to the previous version.

A glitch in the MCA system is to blame for the crashes, which caused the planes to nosedive. And yet Boeing is still rushing to get the plane back up in the air:

The FAA has already seen the documents, since Boeing provided them to the agency in December. The company went into that month hoping that it could still win approval for the plane to fly again before the end of 2019. But FAA Administrator Stephen Dickson announced on Dec. 11 that such approval would not happen until sometime this year.

By pjs2005 from Hampshire, UK, rotated by the uploader - This file has been extracted from another file: Boeing 737-8 MAX N8704Q (27946580010).jpg, CC BY-SA 2.0, Link

It tries and fails to find a new angle on the stringy-haired vengeance ghost

It’s a ritual nearly as predictable as a Marvel movie in May or romantic movies in February: The first weekend of every January sees the release of a new horror movie. It’s remarkable enough that this once-barren weekend has been colonized into its own niche horror holiday. But in some cases, the movies have even been good — or at least respectable by the historically low standards of January movies. Sometimes those relaxed standards are a relief following a season of blockbusters and awards-bait. Movies like last year’s Escape Room or 2018’s Insidious: The Last Key are effective little genre pictures.

The Grudge, the newest American version of the 2002 Japanese horror film Ju-On, isn’t the best January horror movie of recent years. But it may be the most January. It doesn’t stand out in its low-rent cheapness; if anything, its pacing is stately and reserved compared to more desperate-to-shock jump-scare machines. Instead, this 2020 version of The Grudge has the weary, dispiriting feel of a January afternoon. It doesn’t have any snow or visible breath, but writer-director Nicolas Pesce (The Eyes of My Mother) uses a high-contrast but grainy color scheme, bleachy whites, and purposefully drab set decoration to give the movie’s generic suburban setting a gritty, overcast dreariness.

This gray feeling extends to the lead characters: Recently widowed Detective Muldoon (Andrea Riseborough), new to town with her young son and the usual boilerplate about how starting over will be good for them, looks exhausted before she even investigates the origins of a long-rotting corpse. Her new partner, Detective Goodman (Demián Bichir) chain-smokes in a dingy, cluttered house with dim, yellowish lighting.

Photo: Allen Fraser/Sony Pictures

The detectives’ investigation of the dead body in their midst is the narrative spine of this version of The Grudge. But like the 2004 U.S. remake and its 2006 sequel (both of which seem to be in continuity with this one, which takes place primarily in those past release years), the new movie uses intersecting stories across multiple timelines to look at a standard-issue stringy-haired vengeance ghost from different angles. There’s an old couple (Lin Shaye, from the Insidious series, and Frankie Faison) seeking the help of an assisted-suicide guru (Jacki Weaver), and a younger couple (John Cho and Betty Gilpin) grappling with a difficult choice in their pregnancy. They’re all connected to a house where the ghost hangs out, with a strong preference for the bathroom. There are shower, tub, and sink scares, recalling imagery from the original film’s mid-2000s heyday.

The parallel stories are all suffused with grief and loss, contributing to the movie’s wintry seriousness. (Though there’s one big tension-relieving laugh, a smash cut to a character zipping up her suitcase, intending to get the hell out.) The 2004 Grudge was also a somber affair, but it was part of a wave of PG-13 remakes of Japanese horror movies with most of the atmosphere drained away. Pesce has been given the leeway of an R rating, which he uses primarily to make every dead or undead body as grimy and rotten as possible. Even when characters survive, they’re physically marked by their experiences, like the man who survives a gunshot wound with his face healed into twisted scars. The film isn’t especially scary, but it has a creepy, pervasive grimness, well-acted by the impressive ensemble.

Photo: Allen Fraser/Sony Pictures

Yet it’s never clear what all of this grimness is actually for, or what the likes of Cho, Riseborough, Bichir, and the others are doing here. “This is never gonna end,” warns one of the characters who’s well-versed in the years-spanning haunting. They’re speaking aloud the subtext of any long-running horror franchise, especially a second-tier concern like the Grudge saga. But the film doesn’t connect that sentiment to the characters’ vivid traumas. Pesce doesn’t seem to have much to say about parental decisions, end-of-life conflict, or the hopelessness of grief.

This latest batch of existential complaints is all just Grudge fodder, which is especially strange given the way the movie must spell out the ghost’s origins at the top via onscreen text: The ghost/demon is summoned when a person dies in extreme anger. But because this ghost follows one character back from Japan as the movie begins, that initial anger (whether sourced from the earlier movies or not) is secondhand, unconnected to the rest of the characters’ stories.

So The Grudge skips straight into the hopelessness, sometimes bordering on nihilism, and Pesce’s style isn’t enough to enliven the downcast mood. It’s not unusual for a horror movie to reach a dead end of its own making, caught between a desire to resolve a story and to leave some tension hanging for a scare-hungry audience. When The Grudge feels a little worse than usual in this regard, it may have to do with release-date concerns beyond the film’s control. Pesce likely wasn’t writing or directing this movie with January 3rd in mind. But intentionally or not, the movie sets a glum tone. It almost seems to be saying: If you’re going to a new movie in January, you must be in a bad place — or want to get to one as soon as possible.

The Grudge is now in theaters.

Over the past 24 hours, two reports have surfaced about rule violations, one at Michigan State, the other at the University of Missouri. How the NCAA responded to the two vastly different cases offers a troubling glimpse at the organization’s wildly misplaced priorities.

An entire athletics department enabling the sexual abuse of hundreds of people, many of them student-athletes, over the span of two decades? No big deal. A single tutor, acting alone, completing coursework for 12 student-athletes over a one-year period? Lock the school up, and throw away the key.

Let’s start with Missouri. According to an NCAA report released on Thursday, in 2015 and 2016, a rogue tutor at the University of Missouri completed math coursework for 12 Missouri athletes across three different sports. For this unforgivable sin, the NCAA has put Missouri on a three-year probation; imposed a ban on the 2019 postseason for both softball and baseball, as well as a potential football bowl game; and a 10-year ban from working in college athletics for the tutor.

Any way you look at it, this is an extraordinarily harsh punishment, particularly considering that the NCAA confirmed on a conference call that all evidence indicates the tutor acted without direction from the rest of the athletics department.

On conference call, Ncaa committee spokesman makes it clear that evidence indicates tutor acted on her own without direction from colleagues.

— Dave Matter (@Dave_Matter) January 31, 2019

Meanwhile, on Wednesday, ESPN’s Outside the Lines reported that a U.S Department of Education investigation into Michigan State’s handling of allegations against former team doctor Larry Nassar — who sexually abused hundreds of women and girls at MSU and USA Gymnastics under the guise of medical treatment — concluded that the university systemically failed to comply with federal requirements that exist to ensure a safe campus.

In particular, the report reveals four previously unreported instances in which Nassar survivors complained about his “treatments” to MSU officials, only to have their concerns summarily dismissed. The report stresses that at least three of these MSU officials were employees of the athletics department — an associate director of athletics, a strength and conditioning coach, and an athletic trainer.

This brings the number of MSU officials who were warned of Nassar’s abuse before he was arrested in late 2016 to around 20, including former MSU gymnastics coach Kathy Klages and multiple athletic trainers through the years. According to the DOE report, some of those employees still work at MSU.

And yet, last year, an NCAA inquiry found that none of this was a violation of NCAA rules. Michigan State received no probation, no postseason bans, no reprimand of any significance.

It’s a good thing that, while he sexually assaulted the unpaid, teenaged student athletes in his care, he didn’t also complete some of their math assignments. That would have been a real disgrace.

None of this is comes as a shock, of course. The NCAA was also deafeningly silent about the death of University of Maryland football player Jordan McNair, who died during a practice last May in large part due to the coaching staff’s negligence. But that doesn’t make it any less frustrating, or perplexing. In fact, the Missouri sanctions are particularly head-scratching given the fact that the University of North Carolina escaped relatively unscathed from a much worse academic scandal.

Missouri plans to appeal the harsh sanctions immediately.

“The Committee on Infractions has abused its discretion in applying penalties in this case, and the University will immediately appeal this decision that has placed unfair penalties on our department and programs,” the university said in a statement. “It is hard to fathom that the University could be cited for exemplary cooperation throughout this case, and yet end up with these unprecedented penalties that could unfairly and adversely impact innocent current and future Mizzou student-athletes.”

Meanwhile, Michigan State will await its punishment from the DOE, which will likely involve a hefty fine. But its NCAA eligibility will remain perfectly in tact.