"The Book of Life" director is moving into vr, with a project celebrating lucha libre and Mexican culture.
The post ‘Book of Life’ Director Jorge Gutierrez To Make VR Project, ‘Son of Jaguar,’ for Google Spotlight Stories appeared first on Cartoon Brew.
Kelly Mantle, the gender-fluid performer featured in the indie film "Confessions of a Womanizer," is the first person to be considered for both male and female Oscar categories.
The film's producers asked to submit Mantle's name in both the supporting actor and actress categories, and according to Women in the World, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences granted the request.
Interestingly enough, Women in the World also notes that the Actors Branch of the Academy "only established male and female distinctions among actors two years ago." Before then, the nominees were listed together.
Mantle plays a transgender prostitute in "Confessions of a Womanizer," a Miguel Ali indie from Harbor House Films starring Andrew Lawrence and Gary Busey. After taking home numerous awards, including best narrative feature film, and best director at the 2014 Los Angeles Underground Film Festival, the film brings a historic moment for Mantle, and for the the Oscar world as well.
You can follow Mantle on social media on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube.
NEXT: Misty Snow Wants to Make History As the First Transgender Woman Elected to the Senate »
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• New Documentary "The Trans List" Profiles 11 Transgender Americans
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Photo Credit: Owen Kolasinski
Welcome to our latest Bad Advice column! Stay tuned every Tuesday for more terrible guidance based on actual letters.
***
“I married my husband seven years ago.
A close girlfriend of mine was one of my bridesmaids. She got ridiculously drunk at my wedding. She ran around the dance floor like an idiot. She hit on one of my husband’s married friends in front of his wife. She threw up in the bathroom, and one of my aunts had to take her car keys away.
It makes me sick to watch my wedding video because she is everywhere, acting like an idiot. Now she is engaged and planning her wedding, and I feel like I should get stupid-wasted (or act stupid-wasted) at her wedding so she can feel all the hell she put me through.
My husband is not interested in going to her wedding because of her actions at our wedding. He wants to RSVP that we will not be attending and send a card with money, but if I am going to give her a card with money, then I should go to the reception and act like an a–.
What are your thoughts?”
-From “Disturbed” via Ask Amy, Washington Post, 24 November 2016
Dear Disturbed,
It seems a real waste to hold on to a seven-year grudge about someone else’s decision to make themselves look like a complete tool for nothing. Here you have saved up all of this non-refundable ire toward someone you call a “friend,” building anniversary after anniversary of anger, and for what? Simply to let go the chicanery of yore in favor of freeing yourself from a lifetime of resentment based on a few hours’ worth of bad dancing and failed passes to which you have tied the very ruination of your marital memories? Phooey!
We are all the exact same people we were seven years ago; no one has changed or matured in that time, and the memory of your friend’s performance at your wedding is as fresh in everyone else’s mind as it is in yours, which is why your plan to act like a publicly drunken clod as retribution for one evening of poor decision-making is positively foolproof. Everyone at your friend’s wedding will completely understand that the topless woman throwing champagne glasses at the DJ is simply out for bald revenge, as any reasonable person would be, and not really throwing champagne glasses at the DJ, a thing only unreasonable people would really do, and not just ironically do, as you shall.
“We are all the exact same people we were seven years ago.”
_
Your brilliant plan will be appreciated by all the guests. They will greatly enjoy the patient explanations you will give to all of them for your behavior, lest they think you’re an actual drunk asshole instead of a sober asshole pretending to be a drunken asshole. Everyone will think you charming and cool and see this decision as a very positive reflection on your excellent character, which they will understand to be superior to the bride’s based on your elaborate act of retaliatory subterfuge, a totally chill and normal thing to do.
***
“We rarely get a response from grandchildren to whom we send carefully selected gifts. I have concluded that it is mostly due to a pathetic lack of manners.
Children need to be trained to express appreciation for what is given to them, and the irony is that emailing is so quick and easy. The pervasive disappearance of even the most basic manners and consideration for others is cheapening our quality of life and sadly breeding some low-class citizens. Good manners are nothing more than the oil that lubricates human interaction.”
-From “Disgusted in Florida” via “Annie’s Mailbox,” 10 December 2016
Dear Disgusted,
Your awful shitbag grandchildren are the fucking worst. They’re ungrateful assholes who actively choose, day after day, not to teach themselves the basic blasted manners their grandparents want them to have. If they weren’t such low-life scumbags, they’d go right the fuck out and buy a goddamned copy of some Emily Post shit and read the fuck up about how to thank the hell out of their gracious and thoughtful grandparents, who have the nicest manners of any people who ever lived, and definitely nicer manners than the assball progeny of your own children, for whose manner-teaching abilities you bear no responsibility whatsoever.
“Your awful shitbag grandchildren are the fucking worst.”
_
***
“My live-in boyfriend has not exactly proposed, but he has been dropping hints about ‘looking at rings,’ etc. So I was surprised when I came home with a few things from a bridal expo and he shouted that I was ‘rushing’ him into marriage. Now I’m considering ending it. Thoughts?”
-From “Wannabe Bride” via “Ask E. Jean,” Elle, 9 December 2016
Dear Wannabe Bride,
Thoughts, indeed, are all one can have in this situation, wherein two people may or may not be willing to marry each other and may or may not be on the same romantic timeline and may or may not be ready to obtain wedding-related purchases in the service of the marriage-slash-wedding they are thinking (maybe) about.
The last thing one wants to do when one is considering hitching up one’s legal, financial, and emotional well-being to another human for the rest of one’s life is to have a frank and honest conversation about what the future holds. Instead, potential spouses must engage (before they are engaged) in the delicate art of hint-dropping, mind-reading, and yelling about coupons for buy one, get-one-free wedding DJ services. Only this way can romance—the classical experience of hoping and assuming your intended feels anything like the way you do, or the way you think they do—truly flourish.
“Potential spouses must engage in the delicate art of hint-dropping.”
_
No one wants to feed friends and family the unsavory story that mutual agreement and loving consent preceded their nuptials. Imagine, years down the road, the embarrassment of telling one’s children that Mummy and Duds were once young, in love, and capable of discussing their feelings with one another. No, the best you can do, Wannabe Bride, is simply continue to want—or, of course, end the relationship, which is the universe’s only other alternative to desiring to grow old and die with the dude.
***
Lead image: flickr/Ed Schipul
The post Bad Advice On Vengeful Wedding Debauchery appeared first on The Establishment.
Starbucks absolutely cornered the lucrative market of mixing coffee with seasonal dessert flavors. There is of course the famed Pumpkin Spice Latte — the novelty drink that launched a thousand knockoffs — and also-rans like the Gingerbread Frappucino and Peppermint White Chocolate Mocha. Now the chain has created a follow-up...More »
Saved by the Max, Chicago’s insanely popular re-creation of the Bayside High gang’s favorite hangout, the Max Diner, has announced it’s departing the Windy City for a cross-country tour. An announcement tweeted by the restaurant has none other than Mr. Belding on hand to...More »
Shinichi Kudo has shrunk yet again... but so has the rest of the Detective Conan cast! Six new PUTITTO figures from KADOKAWA are available featuring favorite characters from the series, and they're all posed to sit right on the rim of your glass or mug.
The six characters currently being made available are Shinichi Kudo, Ran Mouri, Heiji Hattori, Kazuha Touyama, Shuichi Akai, and Tooru Amuro. Each PVC figure is approximately 55mm tall and posed to sit on, hang from, or cling to the rim of a cup.
For collectors wanting to snag all six, don't worry: purchasing a box will guarantee you will get at least one of each. Boxes are currently being presold for 2,580 yen on AmiAmi (20% below the list price), with a limit of 20 per household. The figures are expected to ship out in March of 2017.
Source: AmiAmi
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Kara Dennison is responsible for multiple webcomics, runs social media and interviews for (Re)Generation Who, and is half the creative team behind the OEL light novel series Owl's Flower. She blogs at karadennison.com and tweets @RubyCosmos.
Fans of the Mass Effect game series will have an extra reason to celebrate in the coming year–Titan Books has a new set of tie-in novels ready to hit shelves, and there are some very exciting names attached to these projects!
From Titan Books:
Titan Books will work closely with acclaimed video game developer BioWare to publish three brand new novels set in the universe of MASS EFFECT™: ANDROMEDA.
The action will weave directly into the new game, chronicling storylines developed in close collaboration with the BioWare game team. The action takes place concurrently with the adventure of the game itself, setting up the story and events of the game adding depth and detail to the canonical MASS EFFECT saga.
The first book, titled Mass Effect: Nexus Uprising, will be penned by Jason M. Hough and K.C. Alexander and released in spring of 2017. Following in the summer and fall of 2017 will be Mass Effect: Annihilation by Catherynne M. Valente and Mass Effect: Initiation by N. K. Jemisin. Mark your calendars!
According to a leaked memo published yesterday on Reddit, a few changes are in store for your local Starbucks, starting tomorrow. For one, “the majority” of U.S. locations are being “turned into a PokéStop or Gym” as a way of appealing to whatever subset of the...More »
Last year, Cards Against Humanity expanded its subject matter by releasing its first-ever Fantasy Pack: A dozen fantasy authors including Patrick Rothfuss, Neil Gaiman, and Jacqueline Carey brainstormed fantasy-themed cards filled with playful questions and hilariously grotesque answers. But you know what goes great with Fantasy? Science Fiction! This week, Rothfuss announced that CAH was launching the Sci-Fi Pack, another collaboration between the company and authors like Elizabeth Bear and Jim C. Hines.
For $5, this pack of 30 cards “poking fun at the Sci-Fi genre” (in Rothfuss’ words) will let you throw down the geekiest cards in your next game of CAH. All proceeds from the first two weeks of sales will go to Worldbuilders, Rothfuss’ nonprofit. What’s more, Rothfuss says, they’ll double that donation before passing it along to Heifer International, the organization that Worldbuilders supports.
Here’s everyone who contributed to the cards!
And an example of their genius in this sample hand:
via @CAH
On the science side of things, CAH reminds you that the deadline to apply to its full-tuition scholarship for women in STEM is December 11.
via GalleyCat
kateSharing for: The owners of the Bareburger chain are planning a barbecue restaurant in the Astoria space that housed their fried chicken flop Burnside Biscuits. Called Salt & Bone, the restaurant is slated to open in January.
Bouley gets another service extension, plus more news and gossip from around NYC
— Danny Meyer’s original hit Union Square Cafe is slated to reopen in its new home on the corner of Park Avenue and East 19th Street early next week. Meyer's partner Richard Coraine tells Flo Fab that all the managers and approximately a third of the servers from the original restaurant have returned. For the first time ever, Union Square Cafe will be baking its own bread, and chef Carmen Quagliata is adding some new items to the menu like polenta with sweet potatoes, and braised lamb shank with salsa verde. Stay tuned for more details on the rebirth of Danny Meyer’s blockbuster later this week.
— The owners of the Bareburger chain are planning a barbecue restaurant in the Astoria space that housed their fried chicken flop Burnside Biscuits. Called Salt & Bone, the restaurant is slated to open in January.
— David Bouley is keeping his flagship fine dining restaurant Bouley open through the end of the "first quarter of 2017." The chef previously announced plans to close the restaurant this year and move it to a smaller space. Now he says via Twitter that the new iteration of Bouley will debut in Tribeca in "2018-2019."
— The Brooklyn spinoff of Katz’s Delicatessen in the Dekalb Market is going to open in spring 2017, according to signage outside the complex in Downtown Brooklyn. This will be the legendary delicatessen’s first expansion in its 126 years in business.
— A marshal’s note is now hanging up in the window of 100% Healthy Blend, the salad restaurant that replaced Dahlia’s on First Avenue and East Fifth Street three months ago. Dahlia’s closed shortly after the restaurant got caught serving underage guests, and the SLA took away its liquor license.
— Los Angeles is getting pop-up versions of two very popular New York establishments next month: the Will Ferrel-themed bar Stay Classy and Bushwick trailblazer Roberta’s.
— Matt Abramcyk and Akiva Elstein’s new Tribeca restaurant Yves is now serving lunch, with a menu that includes chicken meatballs, potato gnocchi, hanger steak, and grilled branzino. Brunch begins this weekend.
— Notorious annual holiday pub crawl Santacon is just 10 days away. EV Grieve notes that Third Avenue dive bar The Continental has a sign up in the window welcoming the costumed revelers, while Barcade on St. Mark’s has a poster indicating that drunk Santas are not welcome.
— During an opening party for the new Lower East Side location of Serafina, guests noticed that a woman was getting ready to jump off the building across the street from the restaurant. Page Six reports that Serafina manager Goran Jokic ran over and somehow managed to get to the top of the building to help bring her to safety. The woman was later taken to the hospital.
— Dan Hoyt, the former chef of East Village vegan restaurant Quintessence, pleaded guilty to harassment charges in court this week. Earlier this year, he was arrested for pleasuring himself in front of a woman on the N-Train platform at the East 8th Street station. Hoyt was sentenced to time served, and the Post points out that he still has an open case for two similar acts several years ago.
— The people behind fried fish operation Bon Chovie closed their Bay Ridge shop last month, but they’re planning to reopen the restaurant at 884 Fulton Street in Clinton Hill tomorrow.
— Bar Works, a company that has opened co-working offices in former bar and restaurant spaces, is moving into a warehouse at 242 Metropolitan Ave in Williamsburg. Only one of the company’s six locations has a liquor license, but the team is trying to get permission to serve alcohol at all of them. Managing director Franklin Kinard explains: "The ability for us to serve alcohol at events is a lucrative avenue for us."
— And finally, here’s a look at The Nomad’s fantastic tart cart:
Ever since Harry Potter and the Cursed Child opened in London in June 2016, it seemed inevitable to ask when (not if) it would make it across the pond to New York City and, specifically, the Great White Way. While there have been rumors for months about just how the show would transfer, the producers have officially confirmed to Pottermore that they’re in talks to secure a theater for a spring 2018 opening.
Sonia Freedman and Colin Callender have their eyes on the Lyric Theatre, which is currently host to Paramour, Cirque du Soleil’s first show developed specifically for Broadway. Paramour will have its last performance in April to allow the Ambassador Theatre Group to renovate the theater—scaling down the 1,900-seat theater into a more intimate 1,500-seat house to make it a better match for Cursed Child. Friedman and Callendar, in a joint statement with J.K. Rowling, told Deadline:
We are thrilled about ATG’s ambitious plans, which will provide a once in a lifetime opportunity to create a unique theatre space tailored to the specific needs of the production over the play’s two parts. The remodeled Lyric will include a smaller auditorium redesigned to the specifications of the Harry Potter and the Cursed Child team, as well as an adapted proscenium and stage that can house designer Christine Jones’ glorious set without swamping or compromising director John Tiffany’s brilliant staging. The spacious front of house environment will also be transformed to optimize the atmosphere and audience experience.
Jones, a New York native, explained to Pottermore how they won’t be doing an exact replica of the production in London’s Palace Theatre:
The hope is that this theatre will have its own soul and its own identity, very much a New York theatre from the period and not just a recreation of what was made in London.
Friedman added that Rowling, Tiffany, and co-writer Jack Thorne are all for the move:
They are very, very happy. John is going to be crucial and very, very involved with Christine and the rest of the design team on the look, feel, aesthetic and overall feel of the theatre. Jack can’t wait to see it, and Jo is fully, fully supportive of the whole venture. Our three Js are as great as ever.
No word yet on if the entire original cast will transfer to New York City and a new one take their place in London, assuming the two shows will even be performed simultaneously. Currently, you can buy tickets through February 2018.
While it has been less than one month since election 2016, U.S. citizens and politicians are eager to predict who will be running in 2020.
Among the most popular predictions is Michelle Obama, despite her statement that she will never run for president.
The most recent female candidate prediction? History maker Kamala Harris.
On election day, Harris became the first African-American California senator, having previously made history in 2010 as the first female, African American, and Indian American attorney general of California.
The Harris 2020 prediction was made by Katie Jacobs Stanton, Juleanna Glover, and Anna Palmer — three powerful women in politics — at the 2016 Fortune Most Powerful Women Next Gen Summit on Tuesday.
"A lot of people think Senator-elect Harris is right in line to run for president as soon as she possibly can," Glover said at the summit.
But, while a lot can happen between now and then, MAKER Kirsten Gillibrand, Democratic Senator of New York, also had her name tossed around as a potential front-runner in the 2020 presidential race.
Here's hoping more powerful women in politics will run. Could 2020 be your year?
NEXT: Watch: The Women Who Won Election 2016 »
Related Stories:
• Minority Women Made History in the Senate On Election Night
• 3 Things You Need to Know About Women in Politics
Photo Credit: REUTERS/Jason Reed
“Ernest & Célestine” (CG) TV Series - Trailer
kateI FLOVE Clair Huxtable.
The news of Florence Henderson’s recent passing felt, to me, like another cruel twist of the knife in 2016. She was, after all, a woman so widely beloved that, for many Americans, young and old alike, she not only represented the paragon of what an authentic, albeit stereotypical “American Mom“ should be like—she actually set a standard for it.
Even in the wake of her death, not many folks realize that Henderson wasn’t actually all that similar to the extremely cheerful, perpetually-pleasing mother archetype she played on TV—though she never actively attempted to shun the image, either.
Unlike Carol Brady, whose passive onscreen disposition occasionally relegated her to the ranks of peripheral sitcom character, Henderson was and always had been brazenly loud and opinionated—a trait that got her into heaps of trouble with television producers and the media.
Henderson didn’t care.
In fact, she persistently tried to shift the social paradigm about American housewives while The Brady Bunch was still in its heyday (from 1969 to 1974), asking the producers and writers numerous times to please give Carol a career.
“Florence Henderson persistently tried to shift the social paradigm about American housewives.”
_
“I used to beg [for Carol to have a job] because I’d been working since I was 8 years old—a lot of them not fun jobs,” Henderson told the Huffington Post in 2015. “I begged for a job because I’ve been a working mother. I have four children. [But they said] ‘No you can’t, Alice is taking care of that.”
After some time passed, and when the producers still wouldn’t budge, Henderson then refused to return for the sitcom’s reunion specials until Carol Brady had a career. So the Hollywood honchos caved.
“You know what they made me?” she once joked long after the fact. “Screw you! A real estate agent!”
In addition to fighting for a more modern representation of women on TV, Henderson also took up social justice pursuits that existed far away from the wholesome, mid-century-modern butter churn with which Hollywood was once so obsessed.
She fought for gay rights and, later in life, sex positivism.
“Henderson fought for gay rights and, later in life, sex positivism.”
_
For example, in the early ’80s—at the beginning of what was to become the U.S. AIDS epidemic that would eventually contribute to the death of her onscreen Brady husband Robert Reed, who was HIV-positive—Henderson organized several benefits for the gay community alongside fellow celebrity and close friend Debbie Reynolds. “‘When AIDS first started, I was one of the first along [with Reynolds] to do a benefit many, many years ago at The Hollywood Bowl,” Henderson told Gay Star News in 2014. “It was not easy to get people [to attend].”
Henderson also said she believed that, had The Brady Bunch been shot in a different era, it would certainly have addressed homosexuality at some point. “At the time that we actually did the show, they wouldn’t have addressed [homosexuality],” she admitted. “But if the show were on today, I think it would definitely be addressed. After all, their father was gay.”
Henderson’s visible and vocal acceptance and advocacy for gay rights and culture likely managed to assuage those who’d grown up watching The Brady Bunch (and I’m hard-pressed to find anyone who actually hasn’t seen the show, even if only in passing), whose own parents had later disowned them because they’d come out as gay. On some small hopeful level, many young queer people understood that America’s favorite mom still loved them.
While remaining a mainstay in public gay advocacy forums, Henderson later began to reveal her own sexuality to America, oftentimes explicitly disclosing her preferences in bed—what turned her off and what turned her on, what she liked and didn’t like, how many partners she had at any given time.
“Many young queer people understood that America's favorite mom still loved them.”
_
Earlier this year, she boldly proclaimed to The New York Post:
“I may have more than one friend with benefits. It’s very healthy for the heart. I think no matter how old you are—and I am pretty up there in terms of numbers—I think you should do whatever makes you happy.”
And prior to this revelation, Henderson told The Daily Mail in 2015 that, for her, sex just kept getting better with age. “You learn to do things with more experience, intelligence, and [you have] the ability to choose more wisely,” she said, after which she admitted, however, that should a future gentleman caller lack a proper sense of humor, she would most certainly be “going home very early” that night.
Henderson’s decision to be so transparent about her sex life exhibited to women (of all ages) that it’s okay for them to defy restrictive norms surrounding sexuality, including by being as open as they please about their desires, needs, and standards.
Florence Henderson Plays ‘The Dating Game’ on The Queen Latifah Show, May 5, 2014.
Henderson was not alone in her “American Sitcom Mom” social activism over the years, but she may have played a role in the sweeping paradigm shift that soon befell TV sitcom matriarchs for the better in later years—a shift that allowed social activism, feminism, and sexual liberation to be incorporated into sitcom moms’ onscreen roles.
For example, the 1980s introduced America to The Cosby Show matriarch Clair Huxtable (Phylicia Rashad)—a black woman who “not only maintained a successful career while raising five children but who refused to suffer gladly any fools who questioned her ability to do so,” as Slate so adroitly put in 2014.
Clair Huxtable was also arguably the first female sitcom mother to introduce what would later be dubbed “intersectional feminism” to the mainstream.
In one particular Cosby Show episode, Clair, a high-profile attorney and extremely well-educated historian, was asked to appear on a talk show to discuss the Great Depression alongside other knowledgeable panelists. As soon the cameras started rolling, her three fellow panelists, all white men, immediately started speaking over her.
When the show’s host asked her about “how the Great Depression affected ‘the blacks’,” Clair immediately objected to being the program’s “token black woman,” to which the host responded by (stupidly) clarifying that she’d also been invited to represent women.
“Clair Huxtable helped introduce what would later be dubbed 'intersectional feminism.”
_
“Oh, that’s nice,” Clair shot back, “I am a woman, who is black, but I am also a human being, who is an attorney, a mother of five, and somewhat knowledgeable about history, which is why I thought I was invited here. But when you look at me, this is all you see in me—a black woman?”
In 1982, two years before The Cosby Show debuted, Family Ties introduced America to another progressive mom: Elys, the baby-boomer hippie matriarch played by Meredith Baxter-Birney. Elys was a mom who constantly found herself in familial spats with her Reagan-loving son, Alex (played by Michael J. Fox), as well as her often flighty, fashion-obsessed daughter, Mallory.
When the late ‘80s arrived, it brought Murphy Brown (played by Candice Bergen) along for the ride. The show centered around the life of a single female news anchor and recovering alcoholic whose feminism, as Jezebel noted in 2009, “was often highlighted by her contrast to the character Corky Sherwood, a ditsy, former Miss America-turned-broadcast journalist.”
As the show’s course began to run into the next decade of the ‘90s—broadcasting amid the new presidential era of Republican POTUS George H.W. Bush—Bergen’s character became pregnant and opted to raise the baby as a single mother. This controversial decision, which was, of course, televised nationally, prompted then-Vice President Dan Quayle to openly criticize the show for “mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone and calling it ‘just another lifestyle choice.’” Quayle’s personal attack on Murphy Brown opened a national discourse around “family values,” while the sitcom itself addressed the former veep’s remarks by editing his speech to seem as if he’d been talking about Brown personally, thus inspiring the show’s protagonist to do a “special edition” broadcast about “different kinds of families” on her news program FYI.
And then, of course, there was Roseanne—which aired in 1988 and ran until 1997—with Roseanne Barr starring as Roseanne Conner, the show’s central, oft-sardonic character. Roseanne was immediately lauded for introducing the world to a relatable character who represented “blue-collar feminism.” Roseanne, after all, was an overwhelmed mother who didn’t fight to “have it all,” but who struggled instead to just “have enough.” She was the antithesis of June Cleaver—she didn’t fit the typical body type of Hollywood stars or societally idealized wives, often appeared to be wearing clothes that came from bargain stores, and wore hairstyles that would likely not have been considered “fashionable” at the time (or ever).
“Roseanne was the antithesis of June Cleaver.”
_
Roseanne also addressed myriad social issues head-on during the course of its run, which aired in tandem with Murphy Brown, thus exposing it to the same sort of entitled Republican upper-white-class criticism that Brown experienced from VP Quayle. Like Murphy Brown, Roseanne never backed down from focusing on these issues, and the show actually wound up addressing several more, including homosexuality, local politics, drug addiction, domestic abuse, teen pregnancy—the list goes on.
A lot has changed since America was first introduced to the squeaky-clean, conventional Brady family. In its wake, it seems Henderson’s outspoken push for feminism and other social justice causes laid the groundwork for a new kind of idealized matriarch: the socially-aware, feminist “American Sitcom Mom.”
And for that, I would like to posthumously say to her, “Oh, Mrs. Brady, thank you so much.”
***
Lead image: flickr/WeHoCity
The post Celebrating Florence Henderson—And Subversive Sitcom Moms appeared first on The Establishment.
With Republicans poised to control the White House and Congress, the National Rifle Association sees chance to attack gun laws at the state and federal levels
For nearly a decade, the National Rifle Association has spurred its members with apocalyptic warnings that the Democratic president wanted to confiscate Americans’ guns.
Now, the NRA has won. The candidate the NRA backed with an unprecedented $30m in ad buys is heading to the White House. Republicans will control both houses of Congress. Donald Trump has pledged to nominate a supreme court justice who supports gun rights.
Continue reading...Here at FiveThirtyEight, we’ve been skeptical of claims of irregularities in the presidential election. As we pointed out last week, there are no obvious statistical anomalies in the results in swing states based on the type of voting technology that each county employed. Instead, demographic differences, particularly the education levels of voters, explain the shifts in the vote between 2012 and 2016 fairly well.
But that doesn’t mean I take some sort of philosophical stance against a recount or an audit of elections returns, or that other people at FiveThirtyEight do. Such efforts might make sense, with a couple of provisos.
The first proviso: Let’s not call it a “recount,” because that’s not really what it is. It’s not as though merely counting the ballots a second or third time is likely to change the results enough to overturn the outcome in three states. An apparent win by a few dozen or a few hundred votes might be reversed by an ordinary recount. But Donald Trump’s margins, as of this writing, are roughly 11,000 votes in Michigan, 23,000 votes in Wisconsin and 68,000 votes in Pennsylvania. There’s no precedent for a recount overturning margins like those or anything close to them. Instead, the question is whether there was a massive, systematic effort to manipulate the results of the election.
So what we’re talking about is more like an audit or an investigation. An investigation that would look for signs of deliberate and widespread fraud, such as voting machines’ having been hacked, whole batches of ballots’ intentionally having been disregarded, illegal coordination between elections officials and the campaigns, and so on. Such findings would probably depend on physical evidence as much or more than they do statistical evidence. In that sense, there’s no particular reason to confine the investigation to Wisconsin, Michigan or Pennsylvania, the states that Hillary Clinton lost (somewhat) narrowly. If the idea is to identify some sort of smoking gun indicating massive fraud perpetrated by the Trump campaign — or by the Clinton campaign, or by the Russian government — it might be in a state Clinton won, such as New Hampshire or Minnesota. Or for that matter, it might be in a state Trump won fairly easily, like Ohio or Iowa.
A second “condition” is that the burden of proof for claims of a fixed election ought to be high. That’s because there’s enough evidence for there to be a clear presumption against theories of massive vote-rigging:
On the flip side, when you’re examining results in thousands of precincts, it’s easy to detect results that look like funny business even when they have a perfectly innocent explanation. If hundreds of researchers are performing hundreds of statistical tests on hundreds of results, there are going to be a lot of false positives, including some that researchers claim have an extraordinarily high degree of statistical significance. (See also: our reporting on “p-hacking” and the scourge of false positives in the scientific community.) It’s also easy to uncover actual but isolated irregularities, such as malfunctioning voting machines, which nonetheless aren’t part of a broader conspiracy to rig the results.
It’s easy for smart people to be deceived by these claims, especially if they’re motivated to see a particular result. And it’s easy for journalists to spread misinformation by highlighting the claims, without providing sufficient scrutiny of them. In 2004, left-leaning sites made a cottage industry of claims that George W. Bush had stolen the election from John Kerry in Ohio, despite a lack of evidence and a wider margin (more than 100,000 votes) than the ones that separate Clinton and Trump in Wisconsin and other states now.
In many ways, undertaking an audit of the election results is tantamount to performing a test for a rare but potentially fatal disease. You want to weigh the probability of successfully detecting an anomaly against the invasiveness of the procedure and the chance of a false positive result. Oftentimes, the risk outweighs the reward. For instance, many experts warn against mammograms for women in their 40s because the underlying risk of breast cancer is low for women of that age and the rate of false positive tests is high, causing undue stress for the patients and subjecting them to further tests and operations that might be harmful.
What are the costs of an election audit? Running them will cost several million dollars, but that’s fairly trivial in an era of billion-dollar campaigns. Instead, since these audits aren’t routine — although maybe they should be — the cost is mostly that they could undermine the perceived legitimacy of the election and the longstanding norm toward uncontentious transitions of power from one president toward the next. Which might be more persuasive … if Trump hadn’t spent the weekend peddling a conspiracy about how he thought the results were rigged in Clinton’s favor because millions of people had voted illegally.
So, case closed, right? Trump, Stein, Clinton-backing Democrats — everyone’s talking about irregularities. So let’s get on with the recount … er, the audit? Actually, I think people still ought to be careful what they wish for. Remember, we’ll be in a signal-poor environment. The audit will kick up a lot of dust, but it’s unlikely that there will be anything there, and even harder to prove anything. Trump is a masterful troll, and trolls — and aspiring authoritarians — can thrive in environments where there’s a lot of confusing information. It’s also worth noting that Stein’s motivations for financing the recounts are ambiguous and she might be prone toward making sensational claims. People’s BS detectors ought to be set to extra high, even as compared to their already-high 2016 levels. (If audits were automatic — a small share of ballots are checked after every election — they might work to build confidence in our elections rather than potentially undermining it.)
Ultimately, though, I’m in the information business. An audit very probably won’t detect a conspiracy, but it will reveal information about our voting systems. FiveThirtyEight and most other American news organizations are founded on the premise that more information is better, even if it risks being misinterpreted. I’ve never questioned that premise more than I have over the course of this election. But over the next four years, we’re all going to have to get used to an environment in which nuggets of insight come buried in mounds of misinformation. An audit is as good a place as any to start.
Ongoing Investigations: Space Brothers by Chuya Koyama, Samurai Rising: The Epic Life of Minamoto Yoshitsune by Pamela Turner, Girlish Number by Diomedea, One Piece Treasure Cruise by Bandai, Animal Crossing: New Leaf (update) by Nintendo.
Song: “Bloom” by Girlish Number
Food for Thought: What are you thankful for, nerdwise?
Topics: J-Novel Club, Space Brothers x Marvel, Sword Art Online movie getting worldwide theatrical release, Dragon Ball Super finally out in English, LeSean Thomas event at Kinokuniya and Children of Ether.
And now your helpful bartenders at The Speakeasy present your drink:
Pumpkin Pie Martini
Directions
Add all liquids in a shaker filled with ice. Shake and strain into large martini glass rimmed with crushed graham crackers. Garnish with a cinnamon stick.
From Trump to climate change, this multiheaded crisis presages collapse. And there’s no hope of exiting the ‘other side’ if political alternatives are shut down
Please don’t read this unless you are feeling strong. This is a list of 13 major crises that, I believe, confront us. There may be more. Please feel free to add to it or to knock it down. I’m sorry to say that it’s not happy reading.
Continue reading...To address prohibitive costs of attendance, the Manhattan university is piloting a scheme helping students save money by lodging in elderly people’s homes
Studying at New York University has become so prohibitively expensive that the historic Manhattan school is introducing a scheme to help students save money by lodging in elderly people’s spare bedrooms.
Andrew Hamilton, NYU’s new president, has approved a pilot scheme to pair up students with low-income older people struggling to make ends meet. The scheme – dubbed “Grandma’s spare room” – may sound like the premise of an intergenerational sitcom but it will begin in fall 2017, and university officials said initial demand had been so strong that it could be extended to hundreds of students and perhaps other schools in New York and other expensive cities across the country.
Continue reading...Ten animated shorts will continue in the voting process as they vye for an Oscar nomination.
The post Academy Announces Shortlist of 10 Animated Shorts appeared first on Cartoon Brew.
kateTHE RIPPLE.
At his 22-year-old bakery, Mark Isreal makes some of the city’s greatest doughnuts, and tomorrow at 11 a.m., he’s launching his latest creation: “the Ripple.” The three-layer megadoughnut boasts a ripple of complimentary flavor, all married together. The monstrosity, only available at Doughnut Plant’s Chelsea location,...More »
kateYeah! Went here in Europe a few times!
New York’s influx of wildly popular Japanese food chains continues as UK-based Wagamama opens its first New York City location on Wednesday. The restaurant first opened in 1992 with an open kitchen, communal tables, and an expansive menu of different kinds of Japanese food — back when communal dining was less rampant. Despite rapid expansion across the pond (and several attempts at opening in the U.S.), its only locations in the U.S. have been in the Boston area.
The chain’s best known as a ramen shop, but it also dedicates considerable portions of the menu to other subsections of Asian cuisine, like curries, teppanyaki, and donburi rice bowls. Wagamama now has more than 150 locations, and the Wednesday opening at 210 Fifth Ave., at 26th Street, marks just the beginning of its NYC footprint. It’s already planning another outpost in the East Village.
As with other hit Japanese food chains that have recently opened in NYC, fans formed a line outside the restaurant before it opened at 11 a.m. this morning. The following may not be quite as rabid as places like Ichiran, though. By 1:30 p.m., Wagamama’s new NYC location did not have a wait for a table — though staff at the restaurant said they expect lines to form again before dinner service. It’s also a huge space. The bi-level restaurant seats more than 200 people.
Besides being the first location in NYC, the newest Wagamama is also the first to serve cocktails and weekend brunch. Offered from 10 a.m. until 1 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday, the brunch menu has dishes like okonomiyaki, eggs Florentine with a steamed bao bun, roti breakfast wraps, and apple and goji berry pancakes. The drink menu similarly has an Asian bent. It has a list of Japanese beers and cocktails like a yuzu mojito. Check out the menus and photos of the space below.
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Wagamama NYC menu by Eater NY on Scribd
Wagamama Brunch by Eater NY on Scribd
Wagamama Drinks by Eater NY on Scribd
It hasn’t been what you’d call a banner week for national unity, so hats off to this LGBT-rights advocate in Dallas who responded to a Christian family she overheard bashing their “gay” nephew by paying for their meal. Natalie Woods...More »
After 54 years in the Tex-Mex game, Taco Bell is making an actual queso dip. Available nationwide starting yesterday, the cheese sauce comes either solo with chips or as part of two new limited-time menu items (the Steakhouse Burrito and the Steakhouse Queso Nachos).
If it hasn’t already,...More »
Last week’s election produced the widest gap between the Electoral College and the popular vote in a generation — a result of Hillary Clinton racking up huge margins in populous coastal states such as California and New York while narrowly losing several Midwestern battlegrounds to Donald Trump. Were this pattern to continue, Democrats could be at a significant Electoral College disadvantage.
Clinton, who’s currently leading in the popular vote by 0.6 percentage points and whose advantage should increase — probably to between 1.5 and 2.0 points — as additional ballots are counted, became the fourth candidate to lose the Electoral College while winning the popular vote. She joins Al Gore (2000), Grover Cleveland (1888) and Samuel Tilden (1876). But Tilden’s loss to Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876 was, in part, because Colorado — which had newly joined the union and said it didn’t have time to run an election — appointed its electors to Hayes via its state legislature. Thus, Clinton is likely to win the popular vote by the widest margin of any Electoral College loser in an election in which all states voted, surpassing Cleveland’s 0.8-percentage-point margin in 1888.
The good news for Democrats is that political coalitions change quickly, and even relatively minor changes can shift the Electoral College advantage from one party to the other. It’s possible to determine which party had the Electoral College edge even when it didn’t produce a different winner from the popular vote. For example, we can say that President Obama had the Electoral College advantage in 2012 and would have been favored to win it if the popular vote had been tied.
We can determine this by means of FiveThirtyEight’s tipping-point calculation. It works like this: Sort the states in order of the margin of victory or defeat for the Republican candidate, starting with the most Republican state (in Tuesday’s election, this was Wyoming, for example). Count up the cumulative number of electoral votes in these states, awarding zero votes for any state won by a third-party candidate. Whatever state puts the Republican over the top to an overall majority — which currently requires 270 electoral votes — is a tipping-point state. Next, do the same calculation in reverse, starting with the most Democratic state. Usually this produces the same result, but it can differ if there were states won by third parties or if there could have been an Electoral College tie. Thus, each election has one or two tipping-point states.
In 2012, for example, the tipping-point state was Colorado, which Obama won by 5.4 percentage points. If every state had moved toward Mitt Romney by 3.9 percentage points, yielding a tied national popular vote, Obama would still have won Colorado by 1.5 points — and every other state he originally won by more than 1.5 points — and thereby the Electoral College.
In Tuesday’s election, the tipping-point state will probably wind up being Pennsylvania, where Trump leads by 1.1 percentage points based on ballots counted so far — although it’s possible that it will be displaced by Florida (Trump +1.2) or Wisconsin (+0.9) before results are certified. This is an interesting trio of states in that Pennsylvania and Wisconsin were previously considered part of Democrats’ “blue wall,” while Florida has been slightly Republican-leaning relative to the national average in recent elections. It’s possible that in 2020 and beyond, Florida will be more of a necessity than a luxury for Democrats and part of their easiest path to 270 electoral votes.
There’s a relatively wide gap between Clinton’s losing margins in these states and her winning margin in the national popular vote. In 2012, Obama’s margin in the popular vote expanded from 2.7 percentage points on the Monday after the election to 3.9 points in the final count as additional mail ballots from California and Washington state — and provisional ballots from other states, mostly from cities that vote heavily Democratic — were counted and added to his tally. Clinton’s lead is likely to grow by a similar margin, which would eventually yield a popular-vote victory of 1.8 points. That would produce almost a 3-point gap — 2.9 percentage points, to be precise — between the tipping-point state and the popular vote, the largest in any election since 1948:
| YEAR | NATIONAL POPULAR VOTE | TIPPING-POINT STATE(S) | TIPPING-POINT MARGIN | ELECTORAL COLLEGE EDGE |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 | D__+1.8* | Pennsylvania | R__+1.1 | R_+2.9 |
| 2012 | D__+3.9_ | Colorado | D__+5.4 | D_+1.5 |
| 2008 | D__+7.3_ | Colorado | D__+9.0 | D_+1.7 |
| 2004 | R__+2.5_ | Ohio | R__+2.1 | D_+0.4 |
| 2000 | D__+0.5_ | Florida | R__+0.0 | R_+0.5 |
| 1996 | D__+8.5_ | Pennsylvania | D__+9.2 | D_+0.7 |
| 1992 | D__+5.6_ | Tennessee | D__+4.7 | R_+0.9 |
| 1988 | R__+7.7_ | Michigan | R__+7.9 | R_+0.2 |
| 1984 | R_+18.2_ | Michigan | R_+19.0 | R_+0.8 |
| 1980 | R__+9.7_ | Illinois | R__+7.9 | D_+1.8 |
| 1976 | D__+2.1_ | Wisconsin | D__+1.7 | R_+0.4 |
| 1972 | R_+23.1_ | Maine_and Ohio | R_+22.3 | D_+0.8 |
| 1968 | R__+0.7_ | Illinois_and Ohio | R__+2.6 | R_+1.9 |
| 1964 | D_+22.6_ | Washington | D_+24.6 | D_+2.0 |
| 1960 | D__+0.2_ | New_Mexico and Missouri | D__+0.6 | D_+0.4 |
| 1956 | R_+15.4_ | Florida | R_+14.5 | D_+0.9 |
| 1952 | R_+10.9_ | Michigan | R_+11.5 | R_+0.6 |
| 1948 | D__+4.5_ | California_and Illinois | D__+0.8 | R_+3.7 |
| 1944 | D__+7.5_ | New_York | D__+5.0 | R_+2.5 |
| 1940 | D__+9.9_ | Pennsylvania | D__+6.9 | R_+3.0 |
| 1936 | D_+24.3_ | Ohio | D_+20.6 | R_+3.7 |
| 1932 | D_+17.8_ | Iowa | D_+17.7 | R_+0.1 |
| 1928 | R_+17.4_ | Illinois | R_+14.7 | D_+2.7 |
| 1924 | D_+26.6_ | New_York | D_+25.2 | R_+1.4 |
| 1920 | D_+31.2_ | Rhode_Island | D_+26.2 | R_+5.0 |
| 1916 | D__+3.1_ | California | D__+0.4 | R_+2.7 |
| 1912 | D_+17.0_ | New_Jersey and Iowa | D_+18.7 | D_+1.7 |
| 1908 | R__+8.5_ | West_Virginia | R_+10.2 | R_+1.7 |
| 1904 | R_+18.8_ | New_Jersey | R_+18.6 | D_+0.2 |
| 1900 | R__+6.2_ | Illinois | R__+8.4 | R_+2.2 |
| 1896 | R__+4.3_ | Ohio | R__+4.8 | R_+0.5 |
| 1892 | D__+3.0_ | Connecticut_and Illinois | D__+3.2 | D_+0.2 |
| 1888 | D__+0.8_ | New_York | R__+1.1 | R_+1.9 |
| 1884 | D__+0.6_ | New_York | D__+0.1 | R_+0.5 |
| 1880 | R__+0.2_ | New_York | R__+1.9 | R_+1.7 |
| 1876 | D__+3.0_ | South_Carolina | R__+0.5 | R_+3.5 |
| 1872 | R_+11.8_ | Ohio | R__+7.1 | D_+4.7 |
| 1868 | R__+5.3_ | North_Carolina | R__+6.8 | R_+1.5 |
| 1864 | R_+10.1_ | Illinois | R__+8.8 | D_+1.3 |
* 2016 popular vote margin is projected
The “Electoral College edge” is the margin in the tipping-point state minus the margin in the national popular vote. Where there are two tipping-point states, their margins are averaged together.
Sources: Dave Leip’s Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections, David Wasserman
In recent elections, with both parties generally being at least somewhat competitive in all four major regions of the country, there usually hasn’t been such a large gap between the tipping-point state and the popular vote. And small gaps have often reversed themselves. Gore, of course, lost the Electoral College in 2000 to George W. Bush despite winning the popular vote. But four years later, Democrats had a slight Electoral College advantage, as John Kerry came slightly closer to winning Ohio, the tipping-point state that year, than to the national popular vote. In general, in fact, there’s almost no correlation between which party has the Electoral College advantage in one election and which has it four years later. It can bounce back and forth based on relatively subtle changes in the electorate.
The major exception was in the first half of the 20th century, when Republicans persistently had an Electoral College advantage because Democrats racked up huge margins in the South, yielding a lot of wasted votes as far as the Electoral College is concerned. This nearly led to a massive Electoral College-popular vote split in 1948. That year, Democratic incumbent Harry Truman won the popular vote by 4.5 percentage points. But if California, Ohio and Illinois — which Truman won by less than 1 percentage point each and by less than 60,000 votes total — had flipped to Republican Thomas Dewey, Dewey would have won the Electoral College.
The question is whether Democrats are re-entering something akin to the “Solid South” era, except with their votes concentrated in more urban coastal states instead of the South. In this respect, California — where Clinton leads by 28 percentage points, more than Obama’s 23-point margin in 2012 — represents lots of wasted votes, at least in terms of the Electoral College.
At the same time, Arizona, Georgia and Texas — which together have 65 electoral votes — all became more Democratic this year. Winning Texas alone would have been enough for Clinton to just barely win the Electoral College with 270 electoral votes.
And it isn’t necessarily the case that states such as Pennsylvania and Michigan have permanently gone from blue-leaning to purple or even red-leaning. Sometimes, states behave unpredictably for one or two elections before reverting back to the mean — for instance, Obama won Indiana in 2008 before it returned to being strongly Republican. The dynamics of 2020 will also be different in that Democrats will be the challenging party instead of the incumbents.
The risk to Democrats is being caught in between, with the Midwest continuing to drift redder and Arizona and the like not yet ready to become true swing states. That’s what happened to Clinton this year, yielding about the most painful loss imaginable.
