Andrew

Image: Zack Roif / Matthew Woodward

Earlier this year, Monotype lovingly updated its classic Helvetica typeface for the 21st century. The company redrew almost 40,000 of Helvetica’s characters as part of the Helvetica Now revamp in an attempt to make the typeface feel nicer to read and to work better at smaller sizes.

Hellvetica, meanwhile, is a much more anarchic affair. It’s the product of Zack Roif and Matthew Woodward, two New York-based creative directors, and it’s designed specifically to irritate graphic designers around the world. Think of it as a self-aware Comic Sans with kerning that’s somehow much much worse.

Continue reading…

Read 17 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Read 13 remaining paragraphs | Comments

The folks over at Canva have put together a fun, interactive Color Wheel tool that might just be the easiest, most enjoyable way way to play around with and learn about color theory.

Canva is an online tool/service that uses a drag-and-drop interface to help beginners create professional looking designs. As such, the color wheel they’ve created is actually meant for designers, but that doesn’t mean photographers can’t use it to learn about color theory as well.

As we’ve pointed out multiple times in the past, an understanding of color theory can work wonders for your photography, especially once you get into post-processing. Getting an accurate color balance is only a starting point, after which you can alter and modify the image to suit the mood and feeling you’re trying to convey.

One of the best ways to do this is by using colors that “work well together,” like complementary colors that sit on opposing sides of the color wheel (see the slightly overused “orange and teal look“), triadic colors for a bold look, or various shades of the same color for a monochromatic look. If none of those terms sound familiar, that’s where Canva’s interactive color wheel comes in.

The brand’s Color Wheel page explains the most common terms in color theory, and then gives you a fun and useful tool through which to learn-by-doing. For example, when you select complementary color from the tool’s drop-down menu, picking a primary color on the wheel will immediately identify its complement as well.

You can change the hue and saturation on the wheel itself, and then adjust the luminance using the point around the edge. Once you have a color you like, the tool will identify its complement; it even gives you the hex codes for both colors so you can type it straight into Photoshop. The same thing can be done with Monochromatic, Analogous, Triadic, and Tetradic color combinations.

Once you’re done, you can export the combination as a PDF complete with swatches, hex codes, RBG values, and CMYK values.

This won’t replace a comprehensive tutorial where you really get to dive into color theory and see its applications in action, but the interactive, hands-on component might just help you get a better grasp on colors and inspire you to get creative with the HSL or Split Toning tools in Lightroom after your next shoot.

To learn more about the Canva Color Wheel or give it a shot for yourself, head over to the Canva website by clicking here.

Read 18 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Photographer Dan Marker-Moore visited a remote location in South America to capture the 2019 total solar eclipse back on July 2nd. He then took the photos of the progression and turned them into beautiful “time slice” composites.

Here are the five composites Marker-Moore, a Sony Alpha Imaging Collective member, created:

This last composite contains 425 photos of the Sun.

All the Sun photos were shot over the course of three hours using a Sony a7R III and a Sony 100-400mm lens.

Here’s a behind-the-scenes video showing how the photos were shot:

And here’s an 18-second time-lapseMarker-Moore made with the photos as well:

Professional photographer Amy Haehl of Coffee Creek Studio recently put some of her newborn portraits through FaceApp to create a hilarious (if mildly unsettling) series of images titled “If Babies Had Teeth.”

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen this. Last year, a photographer from Texas did the same thing using YouApp. But while those photos were everyday snapshots, Haehl actually added teeth to her professional newborn images. The resulting photos combine sometimes shockingly realistic adult teeth with professional posing and the beautiful pastel colors typical of newborn photo shoots.

Some of the images are laugh-out-loud funny; others are a bit unsettling. Here’s a selection of our favorites:

Haehl originally posted the images to a Facebook album, writing, “I haven’t laughed this hard in a long time. I could have gone back and done this to every single baby that has ever come in my studio.” She also clarified that she did ask the parents’ permission before sharing these portraits with the media. Click here to see the full photo album on Facebook. And if this inspires you to check out the rest of Haehl’s work, you can find that on her website, Facebook page, and Instagram.

(via WTHR)

---

Credits: All photographs by Amy Haehl/Coffee Creek Studio and used with permission.

You know who are the worst people on earth? Dingbats who condescendingly scoff at creative works because they’re not “modern.” Those who go to revival screenings to guffaw at pre-digital special effects, or who say things like, “This game sucks! The graphics are so blocky and it doesn’t auto-save every five seconds!”

Read more...

Nicole Nguyen, reporting for BuzzFeed News:

The fallout from Zoom’s massive webcam vulnerability continues. In a report published today, security researcher Karan Lyons shows that the same flaw — which gave attackers easy access to laptop cameras and microphones — affects RingCentral, which is used by over 350,000 businesses, as well as Zhumu, essentially the Chinese version of Zoom.

On July 16, Apple confirmed that it had released another silent update to Macs patching the vulnerability affecting Zoom’s partner apps. The update, which went out this morning, requires no user action, but may take some time to roll out to all impacted Macs. Lyons tweeted that Apple’s latest update takes action on 11 different apps, all vulnerable to the Zoom webcam flaw.

So here’s an interesting question. I’ve been using the phrase “nonconsensual technology” to describe Zoom’s invisible web server that remained installed and running even after you deleted the Zoom app. But when Apple first issued a silent, emergency system update to remove Zoom’s software, a few DF readers emailed or tweeted to ask: Isn’t this “nonconsensual technology” too?

Clearly, the answer sounds like yes at first. Users get no indication of the update, and “requires no user action” makes it sound like it’s mandatory. But there is a setting to control this, allowing Mac users to disable the automatic installation of such updates. On MacOS 10.14 Mojave, it’s in System Prefs → Software Update → Advanced (screenshot); on 10.13 High Sierra, it’s in System Prefs → App Store (screenshot). In both versions, the checkbox is labeled “Install system data files and security updates”, and resides at the bottom of the section that controls what gets installed automatically.

This option is enabled by default — even if you choose to install regular system updates manually — which is why the vast majority of Mac users are getting these “silent” updates automatically. But if you disable this option, even these silent updates won’t be installed automatically. I confirmed this with an Apple spokesperson, who emphasized that Apple only issues such updates “extremely judiciously”. Any pending security updates will be installed the next time you manually update software.

I think Apple has struck a nearly perfect balance here, between doing what’s right for most users (installing these rare emergency updates automatically) and doing what’s right for power users who really do want to control when updates — even essential ones — are installed. I also think Apple is doing the right thing by going to the press and explaining when they issue such updates. If I could tweak anything, it would be to have these updates show up in the regular list of pending software updates if you have “Install system data files and security updates” turned off.

It raises some new (and old) questions about what “product placement” actually means.

Back in 2000, Friends made Pottery Barn’s apothecary table — a dark wood storage bench with a bunch of brass-knobbed drawers — famous when it cast it as the centerpiece of the aptly named episode “The One With the Apothecary Table.” This month, Pottery Barn will rerelease the piece in collaboration with Warner Bros. to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the sitcom’s premiere.

“[W]e brought back the beloved Apothecary Table (from the days of yore),” reads a temporary landing page for the new collection launching online July 30. It’s already on sale in the current Pottery Barn catalog for $1,099. (The apothecary table in the episode set Rachel back $500.) “Could we BE any more excited?” reads the catalog copy in Chandler Bing cadence.

“We are thrilled to partner with Warner Bros. to bring an inspired collection to life for FRIENDS fans,” a Pottery Barn spokesperson told Vox in an emailed joint statement with Warner Bros. “The iconic Apothecary Coffee Table is just one of the items featured in this special collection.” The other pieces remain under embargo until the end of the month but appear to include a tasseled pillow embroidered with “Welcome Friends” in the series’ recognizable font for $49.50, and Central Perk mugs for $14.50 apiece.

The rerelease revives an old conversation on what’s generally thought of as product placement in film and TV (although “product placement” can suggest that money has changed hands, which isn’t always the case — more on that later). It also raises a new question: Is there such a thing as retrofitted product placement?

Five of the six core friends on Friends utter the words “Pottery Barn” a total of 18 times in the apothecary table episode. “You got it from Pottery Barn?” Monica asks, aghast, as Rachel pores over the pages of a mailer from the store. “Yeah! It’s an apothecary table,” says Rachel. But Monica knows something that Rachel does not: Phoebe refuses to shop at the store that Rachel adores.

The apothecary table isn’t the only one of Pottery Barn’s 2000-era products to appear onscreen: There’s something called an “ornamental birdcage,” and the “Sahara desk,” and the “Parker console table.” Says Ross, “Your place looks like page 72 of the catalog.” Later, Rachel and Phoebe stop in front of a store window, Pottery Barn’s logo affixed to the glass, before heading inside to buy a Pottery Barn lamp.

Scholars cite this episode as a hallmark template for product placement in entertainment. “This well-integrated reference to a brand is a prime example of the proliferation of product placement, the practice of placing branded products in the content of mass media programming,” writes Cristel Russell, a marketing professor at American University specializing in product placement, for the Journal of Consumer Research in 2002, adding that marketing resources in 2000 estimated that advertisers paid Hollywood studios $360 million a year to showcase their stuff.

But Pottery Barn has maintained that no money exchanged hands. The home goods retailer told BuzzFeed last year that Pottery Barn did not pay for its product to appear in the episode: “The table was donated and we continue to be grateful for inclusion in this episode.”

Production designer Greg Grande, who worked as the set decorator on Friends for the entire 10-year run of the series, backs that up. He regularly received product offers from companies, “with the right to use it for free and not ‘greek’ out the name,” he says, referring to the art design practice of replacing text with nonsense words. In the show’s heyday, he tells Vox, it was common practice for brands to donate props and set decoration to Friends, ostensibly in exchange for visibility of their brands.

“Name recognition today is different from back then,” says Grande, a veteran of the entertainment industry for the past three decades. “Name recognition back then would most likely just be the product use for free. Today it is negotiated with a fee.”

Most often, he received donated food, beverages, wine, and “stereo-type” stuff. “Furniture pieces didn’t really have the same recognition value as products on a shelf,” he adds. “In this case, the apothecary table was definitely a ‘thing,’” since Pottery Barn was so popular with Friends’ target audience already. Once producers ironed out the arrangement, Pottery Barn gave Grande “carte blanche” to shop its store at the Beverly Center in Los Angeles, “and outfit Phoebe’s apartment however I chose to.”

The apothecary table started not as a prop to be worked into the script, says Grande, but on the page as a “story point.” The original outline and story he received featured the apothecary table prominently, and it was then the task of Grande and his team to source the right product. Says John Shaffner, the episode’s production designer, “I do remember the table and some discussion about it as being the exact thing we needed.”

So the table wasn’t paid product placement, but could it still be considered product placement, full stop? Experts maintain that money doesn’t need to be involved. “Product placement is not necessarily paid, but an exchange,” American University marketing professor Russell tells Vox, “as in this case, a barter of sorts is a form of product placement.” Brands cannot be featured on TV shows unless the production receives permission from the company, she adds. “So here Pottery Barn agreed to have its apothecary table placed — and provided it for the set — in exchange for the producers to hold the right to display it in the series.”

Pottery Barn and Warner Bros. declined to comment on the episode in question, as well as the nature of the companies’ relationship apart from their current and past product collaborations. (Last year Pottery Barn Kids debuted a Harry Potter-inspired bedroom collection with Warner Bros.) However, past comments from senior management at both Pottery Barn and Warner Bros. reference the nature of that relationship.

Patrick Connolly, then executive VP and CMO of Pottery Barn’s parent company Williams-Sonoma Inc., told attendees of the 2004 Catalog Conference that syndication of the apothecary table episode is “the gift that keeps on giving. The phones light up with catalog requests every time it airs.” And the 2002 book Big Media, Big Money: Cultural Texts and Political Economics cites that Peter Roth, then president of Warner Bros. Television, said the deal helped “offset the high cost of production.”

Hollywood Branded, a content marketing platform, reports that 85 percent of people notice product placement onscreen, and 57 percent buy products seen in film and TV.

Pottery Barn

So what happens when what we might think of as “product placement” isn’t product placed in a show or film to sell that product, but instead a product placed in a store to, perhaps, sell (or at least reference) a show or film? Can Pottery Barn’s new apothecary table (riffing on its old apothecary table) be considered reverse-engineered product placement? Or is it simply another example of a longstanding symbiotic relationship in media and merchandising?

“You could refer to it as a retro product placement,” says Russell. When fans of Friends rewatch the show now, they’ll connect with the table as a piece of nostalgia. And, adds Russell, “they may have more discretionary income now to purchase it.”

As Kaitlyn Tiffany writes for Vox, brands are increasingly tying products to popular properties and marketing against their premieres. The third season of Stranger Things is a recent example. Plenty of 1980s-era products, like New Coke, appear in the show — and could appear to be product placement. But as Netflix told Vox, “None of the brands and products that appear in Stranger Things 3 were paid for or placed by third parties. They’re all part of the Duffer Brothers’ storytelling, which references 1980s consumer and popular culture.” The payment, in effect, is brand awareness. You watch Eleven eat an Eggo waffle on Stranger Things. Later, you might pick up a box of Eggo waffles at the store.

Eggos and New Coke help tell the story of the time, too — they’re narrative tools just as much as they are advertising tools. In the case of Friends, Rachel and Ross’s spend-a-thons at Pottery Barn tells the story of Pottery Barn’s ubiquity in the early 2000s. Entertainment Weekly’s review lauded “the mockery of omnipresent Pottery Barn, which almost makes its mailbox-clogging catalogs seem worthwhile.”

What remains unique about Friends and “The One With the Apothecary Table” is that the episode’s references to Pottery Barn are not always positive. Phoebe hates Pottery Barn — hates it! — because “she hates all mass-produced stuff.” She wants her furniture to “have a history, a story behind it.”

Pottery Barn’s $1,099 Friends Apothecary Table, does, in a way, have a history and a story: It starred on Friends.

Sign up for The Goods’ newsletter. Twice a week, we’ll send you the best Goods stories exploring what we buy, why we buy it, and why it matters.

Microsoft just released a free RAW Image extension for Windows 10 that makes viewing RAW files much easier in Windows’ File Explorer—photographers, rejoice. Instead of having to use Adobe Photoshop or other third-party apps and plug-ins to open RAW images, you can also open them up with Window 10's built-in Photos…

Read more...

A new report in Politico says the former CIA director “grilled” CIA analysts on their findings that Russia interfered in 2016 to help Trump.

When Mike Pompeo became CIA director in 2017, he soon began a thorough personal review of the agency’s findings that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump.

His findings? There is no evidence that CIA analysts acted improperly or were under political pressure to come up with a certain conclusion, three people familiar with the matter told Politico’s Natasha Bertrand.

This calls into greater question the necessity of Attorney General William Barr’s review of the intelligence community’s findings, which said Russia intervened to benefit Trump.

Barr tapped Connecticut US Attorney John Durham to conduct a review of the entire Russia investigation, specifically whether FBI agents acted improperly when opening the inquiry into the Trump campaign during the 2016 election.

But Durham, as part of his probe, is also planning to assess the conclusions of CIA analysts who determined the Kremlin acted to benefit Trump — a move that’s unnerved some who see the Justice Department as politicizing intelligence and potentially overstepping.

The Politico report doesn’t offer much detail about Pompeo’s findings, but sources told Bertrand that Pompeo’s interviews with CIA officers were “robust”:

“This wasn’t just a briefing,” said one person familiar with the episode. “This was a challenging back and forth, in which Pompeo asked the officers tough questions about their work and how they determined Putin’s specific objectives.”

A congressional aide also confirmed to Politico that Pompeo never testified or gave any indication to lawmakers that the CIA had engaged in any wrongdoing throughout the course of its investigation.

The fact that Pompeo — an ardent defender of Trump in all things — didn’t find anything amiss with the CIA’s work or its conclusions about Russia’s motives in 2016 is quite significant, as it further repudiates the suspicions of some House Republican lawmakers and Barr himself (not to mention President Trump) that the intelligence community overstepped or acted improperly.

The Senate Intelligence Committee, led by Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC), already came to a similar conclusion last July. “The Committee has spent the last 16 months reviewing the sources, tradecraft and analytic work underpinning the Intelligence Community Assessment and sees no reason to dispute the conclusions,” Burr said in a statement.

But Trump and his Republican allies in Congress have argued throughout the years-long investigation into the Trump campaign’s possible ties to Russia that the entire probe was begun based on shoddy intelligence and that federal law enforcement illegally spied on members of the campaign.

And Barr, as attorney general, has given oxygen to those claims by agreeing to carry out a wholesale “investigation into the investigators.” Of course, whether the FBI acted improperly and whether the intelligence community was correct in its 2017 assessment are two separate matters.

But there’s some fear that throwing both together will jeopardize intelligence-gathering and have a chilling effect — which will make it much harder to defend against future incursions by foreign powers into US elections, by Russia or anyone else who might be interested.

In addition to the Justice Department’s review led by Durham, two other inquiries are examining the origins of the Russia investigation.

Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz — basically the agency’s watchdog — is reviewing the FBI’s handling of the Russia probe, and most recently interviewed former British spy Christopher Steele, of the infamous Steele dossier.

Utah US Attorney John Huber is also investigating the origins of the Russia probe and potential misconduct by Hillary Clinton, although that inquiry has been largely quiet and its status is somewhat opaque.

Barr, with his far-reaching review, has helped give credence and legitimacy to the “witch hunt” narrative. But this Politico report offers another slice of evidence that this conspiracy theory is just that — a conspiracy theory.

From revelations about spreading Russian propaganda to making racist attacks, July 9 had it all.

Tuesday was an especially ugly day for Fox News.

It began with revelations that host Sean Hannity helped spread Russian propaganda about Seth Rich’s murder. It ended with an astoundingly racist attack on Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) by host Tucker Carlson. In between, hosts slut-shamed sexual assault accusers and spread misinformation about former President Barack Obama. Put everything together and it encapsulated all the channel’s worst impulses.

Take Carlson’s increasingly aggressive attacks against Trump administration adversaries, which culminated with his xenophobic indictment of Omar, a Somali refugee and one of the first Muslim women to serve in Congress: He attacked her as “living proof that the way we practice immigration has become dangerous to this country.”

And yet through it all, President Donald Trump continued to amplify the network’s content on Twitter, illustrating how far off the rails both the president and the cable news network he can’t stop watching — the top-rated one in the country — have gone.

Hannity got played by Russian propagandists

Early Tuesday, Yahoo News published Michael Isikoff’s in-depth report on the origins of the conspiracy theory about Seth Rich, a Democratic National Committee staffer who was killed on the streets of Washington, DC, in July 2016.

Three years later, Rich’s killing remains unsolved, though police investigators believe it was a robbery gone wrong. But shortly after it happened, Rich’s demise became subject of a right-wing conspiracy theory that held he was murdered because he had leaked DNC emails to WikiLeaks — a claim that, if true, would indicate that the US intelligence community’s conclusions about Russia being behind the hacks of Democratic targets in 2016 were mistaken.

According to Isikoff’s account, this conspiracy theory originated from a baseless intelligence “bulletin” put together and disseminated by Russia’s foreign intelligence service, which is known as the SVR. Details from the bulletin were posted on an obscure website that often spreads Russian propaganda, WhatDoesItMean.com, and eventually made their way onto the airwaves of Sean Hannity’s Fox News show.

From Isikoff’s story:

The conspiracy claims reached their zenith in May 2017 — the same week as Mueller’s appointment as special counsel in the Russia probe — when Fox News’ website posted a sensational story claiming that an FBI forensic report had discovered evidence on Rich’s laptop that he had been in communication with WikiLeaks prior to his death. Sean Hannity, the network’s primetime star, treated the account as major news on his nightly broadcast, calling it “explosive” and proclaiming it “might expose the single biggest fraud, lies, perpetrated on the American people by the media and the Democrats in our history.”

Among Hannity’s guests that week who echoed his version of events was conservative lawyer Jay Sekulow. Although neither he nor Hannity mentioned it, Sekulow had just been hired as one of Trump’s lead lawyers in the Russia investigation. “It sure doesn’t look like a robbery,” said Sekulow on Hannity’s show on May 18, 2017, during a segment devoted to the Rich case. “There’s one thing this thing undercuts is this whole Russia argument, [which] is such subterfuge,” he added.

According to DC investigators, Fox News’s story was completely bogus. It was quickly retracted, and Fox News announced it was conducting an internal investigation to determine how it was published in the first place. But more than two years later, not only have the results of that investigation not been disclosed, but Hannity has never apologized for promoting the conspiracy theory on his show.

So not only does Isikoff’s story reveal that Fox News unwittingly spread Russian propaganda that was meant to sow doubt about the Kremlin’s role in hacking the DNC, but according to the interviews Isikoff did with Rich’s family, the network unrepentantly traumatized the relatives of a murder victim in the process.

Tucker Carlson smears a Muslim congresswoman as “a living fire alarm”

About 12 hours after Isikoff’s story dropped, Tucker Carlson, a primetime host with a show preceding Hannity’s that has repeatedly come under criticism for promoting white nationalist themes, uncorked an attack on Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) that was beyond the pale.

During a monologue toward the end of his show, Carlson characterized Omar — a Somali refugee who, along with Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), became one of the first Muslim women to serve in Congress earlier this year — as “living proof that the way we practice immigration has become dangerous to this country.”

“She has undisguised contempt for the United States and its people,” Carlson said, citing no evidence and ignoring that 78 percent of voters who cast ballots in Omar’s Minneapolis district voted for her last year. “No country can import large numbers of people who hate it and expect to survive ... she’s a living fire alarm, a warning to rest of us that we better change our immigration system immediately — or else.”

Omar responded on Twitter by indicating she’s taking Carlson’s attack in stride.

On Wednesday, Omar posted another tweet, alluding to the idea that advertisers could boycott Carlson’s show.

“Fox News is now giving a nightly platform to white supremacist rhetoric. It’s dangerous,” she wrote. “Advertisers should not be underwriting hate speech.”

Fox News quickly seized the opportunity to try and twist Carlson’s attack on Omar into a controversy about free speech. In a statement sent to Vox, Justin Wells, senior executive producer of Carlson’s show, wrote that “[a]nyone who values democracy and free expression should be gravely concerned when members of Congress demand that their critics be silenced. Tucker will address this on tonight’s show.”

In the end, however, Carlson smeared a sitting member of Congress as a traitor who is actively working to destroy the country whose Constitution she’s sworn to support and defend. It’s not hard to imagine how somebody watching his show could come away with the idea that Omar is one of the most dangerous people in the country.

Carlson’s monologue illustrated not only how Fox News promotes white nationalist themes but also how those themes are deployed to radicalize people. But Carlson’s attack on Omar was only one of the ugly broadsides made by a Fox News primetime host on Tuesday evening.

Laura Ingraham helps slut-shame Christine Blasey Ford

Immediately following Hannity’s show, Fox News host Laura Ingraham and the Federalist senior editor Mollie Hemingway teamed up to slut-shame Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who came forward late last summer with her statement that then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her when they were in high school.

Hemingway, promoting her new book, sought to discredit Ford by describing her as “a heavy drinker who was much more aggressive with boys than we were led to believe” when she was in high school.

Ingraham didn’t register any objection to Hemingway’s smears, but instead reinforced them, saying, “When you scrub your social media profile, that’s a statement, is it not?”

And that’s not all. Earlier in the day on Tuesday, Fox News used the arrest of Jeffrey Epstein — a convicted sex offender with ties to Bill Clinton and Donald Trump — to launch a misinformed attack on President Barack Obama.

Afternoon host Harris Faulkner and Campus Reform editor Lawrence Jones III blamed Obama for the sweetheart plea deal Epstein received in 2008 from Alexander Acosta, a former US attorney who now serves as Trump’s secretary of labor — even though Obama wasn’t even inaugurated as president until January 2009.

And on Fox & Friends, hosts allowed White House counselor Kellyanne Conway to spread misinformation about the US census with impunity.

Yet just on Tuesday alone, Trump posted six tweets that either directly promoted Fox News programming or featured video clips from Fox News shows. And on Wednesday morning, he retweeted a post from right-wing commentator Mark Levin that attacked CNN host John Berman for criticizing Carlson’s latest attack on Omar as “what to many is just a racist comment — a flat-out racist comment or offensive comment suggesting that people shouldn’t be allowed in the country.”

Fox News viewers don’t seem to be bothered by any of this

Tuesday may have been an especially ugly day for Fox News, but it wasn’t particularly unusual. The network regularly comes under fire for spreading conspiracy theories, amplifying white nationalist themes, and pulling out all the stops to demean critics of President Trump.

Yet Fox News was the most watched outlet on all of basic cable in the second quarter of this year, marking 70 consecutive quarters that it has been the most watched cable news network.

So while groups like Media Matters and Sleeping Giants continue to pressure advertisers to sever their business relationships with Fox News in response to racist attacks like the one Carlson made on Omar on Tuesday night, viewers — including the current occupant of the White House — continue to buy what Fox News sells them, no matter how ugly or inaccurate it may be.

---

The news moves fast. To stay updated, follow Aaron Rupar on Twitter, and read more of Vox’s policy and politics coverage.

The hidden history of a North Carolina coup.

In November 1898 in Wilmington, North Carolina, a mob of 2,000 white men expelled black and white political leaders, destroyed the city’s black-owned newspaper, and killed dozens — if not hundreds — of people. For decades, the story of this violence was buried, while the perpetrators were cast as heroes.

How did these events change the political and economic landscape? Watch the video above to find out what we learned by speaking to North Carolina historians and locals on the lasting impact of the 1898 coup in Wilmington.

If you’re interested in learning more about the event, you can check out the final report from LeRae Umfleet, a North Carolina historian and author, and the state commission that investigated this history. Or take a look at an in-depth documentary about the events of 1898.

This is the first installment in a new Vox series called Missing Chapter, where we revisit underreported and often overlooked moments of the past to give context to the present. Our first season tackles stories of racial injustice, political conflicts, even the hidden history of US medical experimentation. If you have an idea for a topic we should investigate in the series, send it to me via this form!

You can find this video and all of Vox’s videos on YouTube. If you’re interested in supporting our video journalism, you can become a member of the Vox Video Lab on YouTube.

I love hot dogs, but I have never cared much about their taxonomy. In fact, I have stayed fully out of the “Is a hot dog a sandwich?” discourse, firmly refusing to form an opinion either way. But words mean things, and I understand the urge to bring meaning and order to this chaotic existence any way one can.

Read more...

A decade ago, I was sitting in a folding camping chair outside a Sprint store somewhere in Central Florida. I was all alone up until an hour or so before the store opened, and the line never grew to more than a handful of people.

It was launch day for the Palm Pre, and I knew right away that the showing at my little strip mall Sprint store was a metaphor for what was to come.

Compared to the madness and hype of the iPhone launch two years earlier, the people who lined up for the Pre were few, mostly ignored, but just as passionate as iPhone fans. More so, in some ways, because smaller groups and underdogs can be more strident in their beliefs.

I’ve already written...

Continue reading…

If you’re a photographer who often hikes in the great outdoors, the mapping service FATMAP has added a new feature that you may find useful. It’s called the Travel Distance layer, and it shows on a 3D map exactly where you’ll be able to hike to in any given amount of time.

The map doesn’t just take into account the straight line distance for its calculations, but the geographical properties (e.g. slope/gradient) of the map as well. Surface properties such as brush, swamps, or crossing rivers aren’t taken into account.

Simply access the Travel Distance Layer within the app’s Terrain Tools, choose a starting point and set a time duration, and the layer will use a color-coded area indicating everywhere you can reach within that time.

Dragging the duration slider will adjust the area in real-time.

You’ll also have a visual guide to when and where sunset or sunrise will be during your hike based on your starting location.

This feature is the latest to be added to FATMAP’s Web and mobile apps that can benefit photographers, joining things like snow layers, elevations, route planning, offline usage, and more.

You can start using FATMAP through your browser here or download the mobile app for iOS or Android. The app and nearly all functions are free, but subscribing to the Explore membership gets you a number of benefits (e.g. membership card, discounts, and some of the locked app features such as offline map downloads).

... after nearly starting one.

The Cuban Missile Crisis was perhaps the closest the world has ever come to all-out nuclear war, and it all started with a photo.

On October 15, 1962, Dino Brugioni, a senior analyst at the US’s newly formed National Photographic Interpretation Center, identified missile trailers measuring approximately 65 feet in length in an aerial reconnaissance photo. Those trailers were a match for the Soviet SS-4, a medium-range ballistic missile that could reach a huge amount of the United States, including Washington, DC.

Getty Images

Upon seeing this photo, US President John F. Kennedy ordered more aerial recon flights, conducted by the CIA using a high-altitude U-2 spy plane. Kennedy used these photographs to make a plan of action about confronting the Soviet Union over their secretive installation of offensive missiles in Cuba.

To learn more about photography’s role in the crisis, check out the video above. And for more Vox videos, make sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel.

Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Some of the world’s greatest artworks are known for their elaborate backstory or complex history, but not many are actively dangerous to those who own them. ‘The Persistence of Chaos’ might be an exception. Created by internet artist Guo O Dong, this piece of art is an ordinary laptop filled with six of the world’s most dangerous pieces of malware. It’s perfectly safe — as long you don’t connect to your Wi-Fi or plug in a USB.

Speaking to The Verge, artist Guo O Dong says the intention behind the laptop was to make physical the abstract threats posed by the digital world.

“We have this fantasy that things that happen in computers can’t actually affect us, but this is absurd,” says Guo....

Continue reading…

The “hack gap” keeps right-wing BS front and center.

We tend to assume that if a story is being covered by major news networks, it’s because journalists have decided that the story is important.

But thanks to Fox News, that’s not always true.

Fox was specifically created to treat right-wing pseudo-scandals as major news stories. Whether it’s President Obama saluting a Marine while holding a latte or Hillary Clinton coughing during a campaign speech, Fox News looks for opportunities to smear Democratic politicians and mobilize its audience to vote Republican.

But that partisan mentality has an important secondary effect: influencing the coverage of mainstream news networks. One of the ways mainstream journalists try to avoid accusations of “liberal bias” is by paying attention to what happens in conservative media. Which means that pseudo-scandals that get a lot of attention on Fox — Benghazi, Clinton’s email server, Rep. Ilhan Omar’s mention of 9/11 — end up getting taken seriously by mainstream news outlets.

That creates an imbalance that my colleague Matt Yglesias has dubbed the “hack gap”: where right-wing bullshit dominates the news cycle and Democrats are continually forced to play defense.

You can find this video and all of Vox’s videos on YouTube. Subscribe for more episodes of Strikethrough, our series exploring the media in the age of President Donald Trump. And if you’re interested in supporting our video journalism, you can become a member of the Vox Video Lab on YouTube.

Duff Johnson, writing for the PDF Association:

This article offers two things:

• a brief, high-level technical assessment of the document, and

• a question of culture: why everyone assumes it would be delivered as a PDF file — and would have been shocked otherwise.

This has nothing to do with the content of the Mueller Report, but rather the actual PDF file released by the Justice Department. Wonderfully nerdy.

Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

I live in suburbia, so I don’t what it’s like to constantly have to navigate big crowds with little kids. But it seems stressful. You only have two hands! You tell me you’re supposed to dedicate at least one of them to preventing your tiny tots from getting swept into a sea of giants all day long? A Japanese dad named…

Read more...

Broadband and cable providers already have a pretty scummy reputation for hidden fees and inconvenient setup times, but I’m not sure they’ve ever committed a cardinal sin — until now. Yesterday afternoon, a Spectrum employee in the Los Angeles area apparently stole a young woman’s dog and drove off with him. Fortunately for the dog, the entire incident was caught on the family’s security camera.

Monday evening, Melissa Cortez posted the video on Twitter, tagging both Spectrum and local news outlets and hoping her 10-month-old pug puppy, Andrew, would be returned home safely. The video circulated across social media and in a matter of hours local news outlets were responding.

Continue reading…

Beto O’Rourke used to be part of the United States’ oldest hacking group, something he and former members kept under wraps until now, the former representative from El Paso, Texas said in an interview with Reuters. O’Rourke announced his bid for the presidency yesterday.

It’s unclear what kind of hacking behavior O’Rourke engaged in with the “Cult of the Dead Cow” (CDC) hacktivist group throughout the ‘90s, which was named after an abandoned slaughterhouse in Texas. But CDC became influential for breaking into Microsoft Windows computers and writing code to help others do so as well.

It’s not all that surprising that the Fugazi-loving, skateboarding, former rep who fought for net neutrality and live-streamed a sit in on the House floor...

Continue reading…

That doesn’t mean Clinton won’t be a presence.

The pool of 2020 Democratic presidential candidates keeps expanding. But one name that won’t be in the mix is 2016 nominee Hillary Clinton.

The former secretary of state and US senator ruled out a 2020 White House bid in an interview with the local New York City television station News 12 on Monday.

“I’m not running,” she said, “but I’m going to keep working on and speaking and standing up for what I believe.”

Onlookers have engaged in a sort of will-she-or-won’t-she speculation in recent months regarding Clinton and a potential third presidential bid. Longtime Clinton aide Mark Penn last year wrote an op-ed saying that Clinton would run again, and while Clinton had consistently said she wouldn’t run in 2020, some of her comments ignited conjecture that she might go for it after all. In a podcast interview with Recode’s Kara Swisher in October 2018, Clinton said she didn’t expect to run again but qualified that with, “I’d like to be president.”

The idea of a potential third run for Clinton brings out deep and often painful emotions and divisions among progressives. Some Democrats would love to see Clinton run again; others want nothing to do with it. And even for Clinton’s biggest fans, the idea of relitigating a Hillary-versus-Bernie primary is an unappealing one. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has already launched his 2020 bid.

While Clinton may not be on the ballot in 2020, she isn’t going away, either.

She has met with other declared or potential candidates, including Sens. Kamala Harris (CA), Cory Booker (NJ), and Elizabeth Warren (MA), Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, and former Vice President Joe Biden. In 2017, she launched a political action group, Onward Together, and she continues to make appearances and speak out on issues she cares about.

“I want to be sure that people understand I’m going to keep speaking out,” she told News 12. “I’m not going anywhere. What’s at stake in our country, the kind of things that are happening right now are deeply troubling to me. And I’m also thinking hard about how do we start talking and listening to each other again? We’ve just gotten so polarized. We’ve gotten into really opposing camps unlike anything I’ve ever seen in my adult life.”

Clinton isn’t going to disappear from the 2020 primary entirely

While Clinton may not be a candidate in the 2020 Democratic Party primary, it doesn’t mean she won’t be a presence. She told News 12 she would do “everything I can” to help Democrats win the White House in 2020 and that she has advised current candidates not to take anything for granted.

She was the first woman to win a major party’s nomination for the presidency and as such will serve as a model and point of comparison for the multiple women in the current field. We’re already seeing the “likability” question that dogged Clinton pop up about other women candidates, such as Warren.

And the animosity between the Clinton and Sanders camp has not subsided either, and with Sanders in the 2020 race, it seems likely to continue.

Politico reported in February that former Clinton staffers remain angry about Sanders’s use of a private jet for travel as a surrogate in the 2016 campaign. In the piece, Zac Petkanas, director of rapid response for the Clinton campaign, referred to the Vermont senator as “Royal Majesty King Bernie Sanders.” Michael Briggs, a spokesperson for Sanders’s 2016 campaign, called Clinton and her staff “total ingrates.” Politico ran another story on Tuesday on Clinton allies stewing over Sanders’s 2020 campaign and criticizing it in the way the Sanders camp did hers in 2016.

Clinton and Sanders themselves don’t appear to have the warmest of relationships. At an event in Selma, Alabama, over the weekend, reporters noted that Clinton hugged Sen. Booker and Sen. Sherrod Brown (OH) after they delivered speeches, while she and Sanders only shook hands.

In an appearance last week on The View, Sanders was asked whether he would seek advice from Clinton for his campaign. “I suspect not,” he said. He said Clinton had not called him but that the pair have “fundamental differences and that’s just what it is.”

Former Clinton adviser Nick Merrill responded to Sanders’s comments on Twitter, calling them “irresponsible” and “counter-productive.”

---

The news moves fast. Catch up at the end of the day: Subscribe to Today, Explained, Vox’s daily news podcast, or sign up for our evening email newsletter, Vox Sentences.

Politico reports that President Donald Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign wants to advocate for governmental control of 5G wireless airwaves, which would in turn lease access to private wireless providers.

The campaign says that the plan is designed to “drive down costs and provide access” to rural, “underserved” parts of the country with faster internet access, according to the campaign’s national press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany. On its face, the thinking behind the strategy appears similar to a plan that was leaked in 2018, which suggested that the federal government providing its own infrastructure that would in turn be used by wireless carriers. That plan earned plenty of backlash from the telecom industry and FCC chairman Ajit Pai,...

Continue reading…

As noted in a Reddit thread, Facebook has added a "hidden" setting in Facebook Messenger that allows you to toggle Dark Mode on and off.

How to Turn on Dark Mode in Facebook Messenger

1. Send just the 🌙 emoji to anyone (or even yourself).


2. Tap on the moon emoji in the chat after you send it.


3. A pop up should appear saying you found dark mode.


4. Go to settings and you should see it here.


5. You may have to force quit the Facebook Messenger app and relaunch it before tapping on the Moon emoji will work.

It appears that Facebook is testing dark mode on a more limited basis with some users having reported to have seen this mode before. The secret method to enable dark mode works in both Android and iOS. Apple is widely rumored to be adding a dark mode in iOS 13 which is expected to be debuted at WWDC 2019.

(Thanks, Nathan!)


This article, "Facebook Messenger Adds Hidden 'Dark Mode' Ahead of iOS 13" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums