kate

Manga about band clubs has anime adaptation in the works

The Guardian is reporting that George R.R. Martin is taking a new step in expanding the world of the Seven Kingdoms, partnering with Apple to release an enhanced digital edition of A Game of Thrones. The new edition of the book, released today, release marks the 20th anniversary of the book’s publication, and will feature plenty of extras for fans of Martin’s worldbuilding.

Martin praised the project, saying:

The digital book gives readers the ability to experience all this rich secondary material that had not been possible before. These enhanced editions, available only on iBooks, include sigils and family trees and glossaries. Anything that confuses you, anything you want to know more about, it’s right there at your fingertips. It’s an amazing next step in the world of books.

The enhanced edition will also include an excerpt from The Winds of Winter which was previously available on Martin’s website. (If you’re curious, it is one of the excerpts summarized here.)

The rest of A Song of Ice and Fire’s enhanced editions will follow GoT soon, with A Clash of Kings scheduled for October 27th, A Storm of Swords coming out on December 15th, and A Feast for Crows and A Dance of Dragons to come in February and March 2017, respectively.

[via The Guardian]

Hello, Tor.com! Welcome back to the Movie Rewatch of Great Nostalgia!

Today’s entry in the MRGN is 1980’s The Watcher in the Woods, one of my and my sisters’ biggest favorites of all the movies we’ve covered so far. So excited!

Previous entries can be found here. Please note that as with all films covered on the Nostalgia Rewatch, this post will be rife with spoilers for the film.

And now, the post!

 

The Watcher in the Woods was released in 1980, but I did not see it until about five or six years later, when my friend’s mother rented the VHS, thinking it an appropriately creepy ghost story movie for young girls to watch during a slumber party. She was wrong, as it turned out—unless you were a particular kind of young girl. Like, say, me.

The other girls at the party were quickly disenchanted by the relatively slow pace and lack of either explosions, gore, or overt romance in the film, and soon lost interest in it altogether. I, on the other hand, was enthralled. From the moment the credits came up and began playing that lullaby-turned-ominous-suspense-theme, over shots of beautiful, sunlit, and yet also deeply creepy woods, I was irretrievably hooked.

I remember sitting in the TV room with my friend’s mother while the rest of the girls were off doing whatever boring non-awesome-movie-watching things they were doing, excitedly speculating to the lone (and, probably, very bemused) adult in the house about what could it all mean?? Who was the Watcher? What was the significance of the eclipse? And look, the triangle in the mirror matched the triangle in the chapel, and the omg the circle in the water meant that other circle, ring around the roses it was, and holy crap “Nerak” is KAREN SPELLED BACKWARDS, LIKE IN A MIRROR, BECAUSE KAREN IS IN THE MIRROR, and it was all connected, and and and—

I’m not certain, but there is a very good chance that TWITW was my first introduction to the concept of… um.

Well, the best way I can describe it is “the literary convention of creating a fictional reality where symbols, objects, or places have inherent mystical significance and/or power.” I feel like there should be a word for that, but I haven’t been able to come up with it. “Symbolism” is the obvious choice, but in my mind that means something quite different, in terms of literary devices. The Great Gatsby had symbolism; what I’m talking about is if that green light at the end of Daisy’s dock actually did something besides merely represent the false promise of recapturing the past, old sport.

Maybe it’s just that no one bothered to name it, seeing as it is almost exclusively the purview of SF stories, but more likely it’s because my Google-fu is subpar. Bleah.

Anyway, I might not know what to call it, but I bet you know exactly what I’m talking about: worlds where things like circles and triangles and mirrors and doorways all have the power to alter reality, merely by being what they are. And though I have never subscribed to the belief in the spiritual significance of these kinds of things in real life, I adore them in stories to itty bitty tiny bits. And I’m pretty sure that this movie was one of the first, if not the first, story that gave me the joy of discovering that love.

And as was my wont, I immediately tracked the movie down afterwards and demanded that my sisters be enthralled by it too, and the rest is history. To give you an idea of the importance of The Watcher in the Woods in my and my sisters’ nostalgic sphere, Liz and Kate’s textual reply to the news that we were reviewing it next on the MRGN was basically an explosion of “OMG”s and beaming ecstatic emojis. Not that I am mocking them, because my response was essentially the exact same thing. We loved, loved, LOVED this movie as kids. Which perhaps makes it rather strange that none of us had seen it in at least fifteen years, if not longer.

But I think I know why I, at least, never sought it out until now. Because this had been such a seminal movie of my childhood, cementing both my love of SF movies in general and my love of stories containing psychic phenomena/whatever that mystical symbolism thing is I can’t name in particular. So I think I avoided it as an adult because I absolutely did not want to find out that it had been visited by the Suck Fairy in the intervening years. Sort of a twist on that old saw about never meeting your heroes, I suppose.

But these days I have a JOB to do, y’see, and so I steeled myself for possible disappointment even as I gleefully anticipated doing the cinematic equivalent of reconnecting with a long-absent but still beloved childhood friend.

In discussing what we remembered of the movie beforehand, it was interesting how much of our memories were attached to the overall sound and look of the film rather than specifics. It has been well-established by now that I am a sucker for a good soundtrack, but I really do believe the importance of a film score for setting the mood and motif of a film cannot be overestimated—and for this kind of film, where mood and setting are the film’s greatest strength, it is even more true.

Liz in particular commented on the gorgeousness of the woods footage; somebody was apparently very enamored of the filtered sunlight effect, and it was awesome.

The music for Watcher was composed by Stanley Myers, who Wikipedia informs me wrote the scores for over 60 films before his death in 1993. He is most well-known for the guitar piece “Cavatina”, the theme for Deer Hunter, but perhaps he would be pleased to know that it is his warped-music-box theme for Watcher that has been most indelibly engraved on my and my sisters’ brains, to our delight. YouTube has sadly failed me in providing a good clip of the theme (that I could find, anyway), but trust me, it’s great.

The interesting thing about Watcher is that in its own way it is actually something of a genre-buster. The general set-up and atmosphere of the movie strongly leans toward the ghost story/mystery/Gothic thriller, but in the end it takes an abrupt turn for the straight-up science fictional, where it turns out that the mysterious “watcher” is actually an inter-dimensional alien who needs to get back home. Nowadays that kind of sudden left turn would make me blink a bit, but back in the day it never occurred to me to be weirded out about it.

Though perhaps I would have been had I seen the alternate ending back in the day. Seriously, my sisters and I put on the “alternate ending” clip in the DVD extras and were like, OMGWTFBBQ. Let’s just say, all we got to see of the Watcher in the original cut was this:

But apparently something quite a bit more concrete had originally been planned.

LIZ: WHOA.

KATE: Whaaaaaaat

ME: Holy alien Muppets, Batman!

Allow me to state for the record (a statement corroborated strongly by Sisters Liz and Kate) that whoever decided to nix that thing for the aforementioned amorphous ball of light was a GENIUS. Even if we did get a giant kick out of seeing the alien Muppet blast Jan’s boyfriend Mike across the chapel with its laser beam eyes.

This, by the way, is Mike:

I trust no further explanation of our glee is needed.

But beautiful Mike-blasting aside, this extremely literal depiction of the alien was an extraordinarily bad idea that I am heartily grateful the filmmakers decided to scrap. (There is an even longer alternate ending, where we actually see Jan go to the alien’s dimension to rescue Karen, that is even worse.) Instead, wonderfully, we got a possessed younger sister Ellie to stand in as the alien’s spokesperson, in a much more effective continuation of the earlier ghost/psychic phenomena motif. This approach allowed the movie to not only avoid trying to depict things it frankly had neither the imagination or the budget for, but it let the story imply the hard SF edges of the plot without ever being forced to explicate them directly, which meant, in my opinion, that the whole thing held together infinitely better than it would have otherwise, and also possessed infinitely less cheese to boot. It’s win all around, as far as I am concerned.

(The more alien-y alternate ending is, I think, much more in line with the 1976 novel the movie was based on by Florence Engel Randall. I say “I think”, because even though I actually tracked down the novel and read it as a teenager, I really don’t remember enough about it to say so with confidence. But in any case, as we all know, you can do things in novels you really just can’t in films, especially not in the late 70s, and I commend the filmmakers for recognizing that.)

As a side note, Liz was bothered the whole movie about the young actress playing Ellie, until she finally realized that Kyle Richards is now one of the original Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. At which point I was forced to make endless fun of her for knowing enough about that show to recognize anyone on it, but even so: wow. Okay then.

Which reminds me to point out that if there is any one major flaw in this movie, it is the horribleness of its acting. Most particularly, unfortunately, the awfulness of the actress in the lead role.

Frankly I was rather shocked to find that Lynn-Holly Johnson had had any other acting jobs beyond this one, but apparently she did (including a role in Ice Castles, LOL), which I find more than a little beboggling, because wow is she bad in Watcher. I mean, even as kids we thought she was bad, and if you can get through the movie without wincing at her at least once as an adult, your willpower is considerable.

However, that said, on rewatching the movie now, we marveled at how the badness of Johnson’s acting was actually not the deterrent it should have been. Watching it now, in fact, her overacting contributed, in a very weird way, to selling the overall feel of the entire movie. I don’t really know how to explain it, except that for something like this—you know, your basic Disney Gothic YA alien ghost mystery thriller… thing, which you have to admit is a rather unusual niche to fill—the exaggerated, er, everything about her performance really sort of worked, mostly. Look, I don’t know, it’s confusing.

LIZ: That doesn’t explain her whacko accent, though. “Samthing AHW-ful hey-appened here.” What the hell is that?

KATE: Wikipedia says she was born in Chicago.

ME: Then I think she owes Chicago an apology.

This movie, by the way, is pretty much the gold standard of what I meant when I explained about our love of the Disney Live-Action Trash Movie, from the low budget to the questionable effects and right on down to the (to me) inexplicable presence of an elderly Bette Davis:

Who, kind of hilariously, manages to tone down her far superior acting ability in this movie to blend in with the rest of the cast. Though honestly I’m not sure if that was by design, or if Bette was just kind of done at that point and couldn’t be arsed to do more. In any case, she still failed to camouflage her natural charisma, and my intrigue at her presence in Watcher is what later led me, in probably appallingly backwards fashion, to the gems of her earlier years, like Whatever Happened to Baby Jane and All About Eve (one of my favorite movies of all time, you should totally watch it if you haven’t already). Sorry, Bette, you may have tried to be awful (AHW-ful), but you couldn’t quite pull it off.

In the aggregate, while my sisters and I thoroughly enjoyed this movie despite (or maybe because of) its flaws, I don’t know that I could necessarily recommend it to another adult who did not have the nostalgic background to look past those flaws. Acting aside, the plot twists and mysterious symbols and jumpscares that so entranced me as a child are likely to strike an adult viewer as clichéd at the very least.

But then again, maybe not. Just because something’s been done before doesn’t mean no one should ever do it. And if you are an adult who loves movies like Stir of Echoes or The Skeleton Key, it might be worth giving this one a whirl, just to see something similar in simplified, diminutive form.

And if you know a kid of pre-teenish age just getting into the YA swing of things, show them this film, because if they are even slightly like me they will EAT IT UP. Eat it up and then ask for more, please. It would please me greatly if even one other young girl or boy could get anything near the excitement and pleasure out of this movie that we did. I would consider it mission accomplished, really.

And so ends my review of The Watcher in the Woods! And as (almost) always, we finish with my Nostalgia Love to Reality Love Scale of Awesomeness!

Nostalgia: 10

Reality: 8 (but really kind of 10)

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And that’s the story, morning glories! Come back and join me in two weeks, when you’ll discover that you have been recruited by the Star League to watch and squee over 1984’s The Last Starfighter! Huzzah! See you then!

The other day, a stranger asked me if I worked, and I answered “part-time.” Another woman who knows me corrected me. “You work all the time,” she said and winked. “A mother’s work never ends.” I conceded the point; with two kids, one of whom has significant disabilities, I do in fact feel like I’m busting my tail 24/7. But I also cringed.

“Stay-at-home mom” is a box on an employment questionnaire, and this is supposed to feel like a validating, even feminist development. We are honoring the work of women when we call motherhood “the hardest job on the planet.” But if a woman’s role as a mother is a round-the-clock job, then how can she ever justify leaving it to do another one? “Stay-at-home” begins to feel less like a descriptor and more like an order.

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“If a woman's role as a mother is a round-the-clock job, how can she justify doing another one?”
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Is that precisely the point? Is the professionalization of parenting designed to push a woman back into the domestic spheres where gender normative roles insist she belongs?  

In answering this question, it’s helpful to think about toilet scrubbing in the ‘60s. In the Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan relays one way chemical companies marketed to the average 1960s American housewife: They encouraged her to buy a separate product for each of her household cleaning tasks. “When [a housewife] uses one product for washing clothes,” a Madison Avenue consultant wrote, “a second for dishes, a third for walls, a fourth for floors, a fifth for venetian blinds, etc., rather than all-purpose cleaner, she feels less like an unskilled laborer, more like an engineer, an expert.” In other words, in order to sell more products, corporate America elevated and “scientized” the role of housewife. They established it as a high-level profession.

Today a giant jug of all-purpose cleaner sits beneath my sink, but the new job for which there is plenty of scientifically researched accoutrement is parenthood. Contemporary middle-class parents are juggling baby-food grinders and frozen breast milk bags, organic crib mattresses and mesh bumpers, car seat recalls and “toxic formula” headlines, infant massage manuals and Mommy-and-Me Yoga classes, Baby Einstein and Diaper Genie. They’re hearing dire predictions about the future of their children’s emotional attachments or sensory processing developments or tech-savvy, rewired brains. They’re encouraged to keep constant tabs on their kids 24/7 with video monitors and cell phones, and they’re blamed relentlessly when freak accidents occur, like alligator attacks and gorilla exhibit misfortune. As Frank Furedi wrote in Paranoid Parenting, “Now almost every parenting act, even the most routine, is analysed in minute detail, correlated with a negative or positive outcome, and endowed with far-reaching implications for child development.”

Dr. Judith Suissa, Professor of Philosophy of Education at the Institute of Education at University College London, calls this “the scientization of the parent-child relationship.” The message is so embedded in our culture that it’s hard to see: Being a mother is a job for which you must learn the science. You must have, at the ready, your metaphorical specialty cleaners. You must be armed with your organic baby food cookbook and your literacy boosting “discovery cards,” with your Brest Friend pillow and your Moby wrap and your Arm’s Reach Co-Sleeper. (Among the latter, I had all three.)

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“The message is embedded in our culture: Being a mother is a job for which you must learn the science.”
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Suissa mentioned the Arm’s Reach Co-Sleeper specifically when I asked her to illustrate the ways that parenting has become “scientized.” She notes how the product declares that it “provides night-time security that benefits a growing baby’s emotional development.” This kind of language raises profit margins, of course. (According to Pamela Paul’s Parenting, Inc, the “mom market” is worth $1.7 trillion.) But it also turns the parent-child relationship into a science, one a good parent learns in order to raise the right kind of kid.

“You can find many references,” Suissa told me, “to how certain things one does as a parent will or will not help one’s child ‘develop secure attachment,’ ‘enhance emotional well-being,’ ‘prevent separation anxiety.’” She also cites the Amazing Baby Developmental Duck. “Even the name is telling,” Suissa says. “It is not just a toy duck, but a ‘developmental duck.’… Clearly, one of the effects of the pervasive use of this language is that parents get the message that they need to be fully informed of the latest scientific research in order to be good parents.” And if parenting requires this level of comprehensive technical knowledge, then it becomes an all-consuming profession—one that pulls against any other interests or demands.  

The verb “to parent” didn’t enter the American lexicon until 1958. It’s telling that this is the only familial role to be verb-ified: although a woman would never say, “I need to daughter better,” she might say, “I’m working on my parenting.” A daughter is only something you are, but parenting is something you do. (“Mother” and “father” are also verbs, though it’s noteworthy that only one of them is a job. “Mothering a child” is a form of parenting, an all-consuming personal vocation, while “fathering a child” is a one-off event.)

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“It's telling that 'parent' is the only familial role that has also become a verb.”
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“‘To parent,’” Alison Gopnik writes in “A Manifesto Against Parenting,” “is a goal-directed verb; it describes a job, a kind of work. The goal is to somehow turn your child into a better or happier or more successful adult—better than they would be otherwise…. The right kind of ‘parenting’ will produce the right kind of child, who in turn will become the right kind of adult.”

To some, this sounds like common sense. But the paradigm of believing that you can do X and Y to produce a child like Z is a suspicious twentieth century development. It has its roots in the 1920s, when childrearing advice exploded. With the rise of psychology, parenting experts (read: male) weighed in with vigor on the behaviors and decisions of mothers and how they were affecting (often adversely) their children. (Most famously, John B. Watson told women they should stop kissing and hugging their children because such affections would interfere with habit-training. The world would not kiss and hug them, so why should mothers?) As Paula S. Fass, author of The End of American Childhood, argues, “Male experts attacked women’s knowledge and made [mothers] suspects in the mismanagement of their children.” Right or (often) wrong, male experts became the informed bosses to whom mother-workers should submit.

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“Male experts became the informed bosses to whom mother-workers should submit.”
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The male expert reigned so supreme, in fact, that Mrs. Max West, mother of five and author of the Children’s Bureau’s popular pamphlet, Infant Care, saw her name removed from all editions published after 1919. An amateur mother could not possibly be a trusted voice of wisdom, copyright ethics be damned. “The new experts—psychologists, pediatricians, psychiatrists, and others—would become each mother’s personal trainer,” wrote Fass. It seems far from coincidental that the influx of parenting advice occurs precisely when women were bobbing their hair and casting their first votes. By making parenting a daunting job for which women’s intuition couldn’t be relied on, and for which male experts had to be consulted, the culture tugged women back toward prescribed gender roles.

John B. Watson begat, among many, Dr. Spock, who begat, among many, attachment-parenting guru Dr. Sears, who brought into my own home the belief that I should never put my baby down, even in one of those bouncy seats, lest I damage our mother-child bond. Although the content of the parenting advice has changed through the decades, the volumes have only increased. Gopnik cites the roughly 60,000 parenting books on Amazon today, many of which, she says, “have ‘how to’ somewhere in the title.” These aren’t just books of advice—they are training guides. They emphasize that every minor choice a parent makes can lead to drastic consequences in the lives of their children. They underscore the high stakes of the job.

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“Parenting books aren't just advice—they are training guides. They underscore the stakes of the job.”
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Because women still do the bulk of the childrearing, the scientization of parenting weighs most heavily on mothers. It has fueled what sociologist Sharon Hays calls “intensive mothering,” in which, as Hays writes, “the methods of appropriate child rearing are construed as child-centered, expert-guided, emotionally-absorbing, labor intensive, and financially expensive.” Intensive mothering has become the standard ideal, the paradigm of “good mothering,” against which all mothers are measured. The intensive mother is the mother who knows developmental stages and toy recalls and car seat requirements. She answers every midnight cry. Her kid never falls into a gorilla exhibit. She mothers so fully, so completely, that her child is sculpted into a perfectly developed human to whom only wonderful things happen, because the good mother enables only wonderful things.

Hays found it odd that the role of motherhood has become much more labor-intensive at the very time that American women now make up over 50% of the workforce. That is, at precisely the point when women are contributing more than their male counterparts to American labor, the domestic job they are traditionally expected to do has vastly increased its demands.

And maybe that’s the ticket, as they say. In All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenting, Jennifer Senior suggests that today’s professionalization of parenting is actually a response to women’s liberation. Senior argues that there is an “enduring link,” as she puts it, between women’s increased independence and the cultural pressure for women to be “more attentive” in their mothering. She quotes Sharon Hays: “Whenever the free market threatens to invade the sanctity of the home, women feel greater pressure to engage in ‘intensive mothering.’”

For evidence of Hay’s claim, take not only the 1920s era of suffragist-meets-parenting-expert, but the 1950s as well. The word “parent” as a verb, born in 1958, emerged just one year before The White House Conference on Children and Youth expressed concern over the growing rise of women in the workforce. (As Fass writes, “during the supposedly domestic 1950s, more than 30 percent of all married women were in the labor force.”) In other words, as more women were working outside the home, the language of parenting implicitly suggested that motherhood was already plenty of work for a woman. More work would be unnecessary, and indeed, would take away from their functioning at their primary job.

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“The language of parenting suggested that motherhood was already plenty of work for a woman.”
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And the more work the job of mothering takes, the less energy women have for other careers. Consider today’s widely-hailed “attachment parenting” approach. With its on-demand, all-night nursing and co-sleeping, it’s far from easy for a woman who has to get to the office come morning. A committed attachment mother I know had to forego the rules and let her son “cry it out” (an attachment parenting taboo) when she found herself so sleep-deprived that she nearly crashed her car into a truck on her way to work. “What good am I if I’m dead?” she said. It’s a compelling point, but some “professional”-level attachment mothers would have looked askance at how she chose to resolve the problem. If you can’t do both your rigorous parenting regimen and your paying job, it might be obvious to them which one should go.

It’s ironic: In an age where we pay plenty of lip-service to “women’s choices,” we’ve created an ideal of motherhood that inscribes personal choice as impossibly selfish. (Non-parents aren’t exempt here; the woman who chooses not to have children may be the most selfish of all.) What our culture of parenting seems most afraid of is not the breached gorilla cage, not the freak alligator attack, not the compromised car seat or the DHA-deficient baby brain or the delayed fine motor development of a toddler. It seems most afraid of the woman who claims her authority, defines for herself how she wants to live her life, and lives it, “experts” be damned. What if we called this a “good mom”?

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Lead image: hottholler/flickr

The post How Parenting Became A Full-Time Job, And Why That’s Bad For Women appeared first on The Establishment.

Each one costs about $12

The newest line-inducing food craze in New York comes from the mother-son team behind Drunken Dumpling, a tiny restaurant in the East Village specializing in soup dumplings. The biggest draw: a soup dumpling so big that it can only be sipped through a straw. Yuan Lee and his chef mother Qihui Guan opened the restaurant last week, and almost immediately, lines started forming to eat and, of course, Instagram the monster-sized soup dumpling.

Guan, a former math teacher who also used to work at Joe’s Shanghai, is so far the only person at the restaurant who can make them, meaning that only 25 are available each day. Despite the rain on Monday, people lined up before the doors at 137 First Ave. even opened, Lee says. "Let me tell you sweetheart, if I expected it to be like this, I would have rented 3,000-square-feet," he says. "I would not rent an 800 square feet restaurant with a 300 square feet kitchen. I would have five staff like my mom doing this."

[the making of the giant soup dumpling]

Drunken Dumpling is not the first place to create such a gigantic soup dumpling. Guan first spotted the phenomenon on the internet from restaurants in China. An outpost of a Chinese chain Wang Xing Ji in Los Angeles has even been selling one since 2012. (Critic Jonathan Gold aptly compared it to a water balloon.) Guan tells Eater in Mandarin that she wanted to recreate it herself when her family decided to open a restaurant. It took two tries before she made a version that she liked, with her ideal mix of chicken, pork, and vegetable broth, and a thin dough wrapper. It costs $11.75.

The giant dumpling is created much like any other soup dumpling. Guan boils a broth for six to eight hours until it’s a milky color, eventually adding vegetables, pork, chicken, crab, shrimp, and more. The broth gets portioned out in a small bowl and rests in the fridge, which turns it into a gelatinous solid. Guan then turns the bowl upside down into a dumpling wrapper and steams it for ten minutes.

It grows about 25 percent in size — she puts a piece of cabbage on top of the dumpling so that it doesn’t stick to the cover — and once it’s out, you can jiggle the soup gently from side to side, watching it swish around inside the dough. Though the wrapper is not quite as thin as a smaller dumpling for logistical reasons, Guan still prides herself on its translucency. The straw to drink it must puncture the skin gently, lest soup unleash itself onto the rest of the table.

The mother and son may add a bigger chunk of pork inside the dumpling later so that it mimics its smaller cousins a little bit more, but for now, it’s "literally a big bowl of soup" inside a piece of dough, Lee says. "We wanted to have as much soup as possible," he says. "This is the soup that I drank when I was a baby boy."

The other, smaller soup dumplings — one with pork and one with crab and pork — have also sold out every day. After they’re all gone around 8:30 p.m., Guan starts prepping again. In the last week, she and Lee stay up chopping and prepping until about 1 a.m. They get back to the restaurant at 9 a.m. the next morning to do it all over again.

Guan says she’s looking forward to when they train people to do some of the work. Once that happens, she will have more time focus on her favorite — desserts.

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Watch: How To Make Dumplings at Home

Apparently hoping to combine America’s two most #basic crazes — brunch and limited-time novelty flavors — with the bonus of high blood sugar is another new candy corn from Brach’s. For $2.50 this Halloween, Target shoppers can grab these exclusive variety bags of “Brunch Favorites,” which...More »

Instant-ramen-maker Nissin Foods is leaping aboard the sudden new trend of bringing Americans natural versions of items often found in vending machines. The brand says Cup Noodles is undergoing a recipe change, the first in the 45-year-old college staple’s history, that will give the product an “improved nutritional...More »

Restaurants will have to set schedules two weeks in advance

The lives of New York’s 65,000 fast food employees may soon be a little less hectic. Crain’s reports that Mayor Bill de Blasio plans to introduce a law that will force fast food restaurants to schedule shifts in advance. Labor advocates have complained for years that unpredictable scheduling makes it hard for fast food workers to take other jobs that they need for extra income or find care for children and sick family members. The mayor’s new law requires employers to post schedules two weeks in advance and pay employees when they have to make a last minute change.

The announcement comes right after the campaign to raise the chain restaurant minimum wage to $15-per-hour. It’s part of an ongoing effort to try improving income inequality in the city. Besides advance scheduling, the legislation also bans restaurants from asking employees to work two shifts that are within ten hours of each other — an addition that would end the practice where employees close the restaurant one night and open it again the next day. It's currently common for restaurants to schedule people last minute based on software that helps them track demand, according to Crain's.

Though the legislation would only apply to fast food restaurants if passed, changes in the chains tend to have a trickle down effect to mom-and-pops and full-service restaurants, too. The demand for restaurant labor is high, and restaurants seeking quality employees have said they must stay competitive on wages and benefits to attract them.

• De Blasio has beef with fast-food restaurants [Crain’s]

November 18 film retells story from Suwa's view, then continues story

“AutoPanther” japanese commercial, animated by legendary Shinji Hashimoto.

As New York Comic Con looms ever closer, they’ve announced the Main Stage Clearing and Badge Tapping – procedures and…wow, clearing rooms is not easy. New York Comic Con will once again clear the Main Stage Presented by AT&T after each Panel. This year you will be required to tap your Badge in the morning […]

As in the past, the folks at ReedPOP have graciously shared a text file of ALL the panels at NYCC, all 200+ of them. Please note, although the list is current as of a few weeks ago, it is NOT the final panel list, as that changes right up until the last minute. You’ll be able […]

This year I didn’t spend as much time in the alley as I usually do. So I’m not too keen on making any overall observations about what was there this year. I will say there seemed to be a lot more artists making comics, fan or original, than I’ve seen in years past. Oh how I wished I could have gotten more!

Anyway, this is mostly a shoutout post for the amazing artists that I picked stuff up from at this year’s Otakon.

With a tagline like “Delinquent Animals!” there was really no way that my first purchase wasn’t going to be Cry to the Moon an original comic anthology by Love Love Hill (Twitter: @love_love_hill). They had a ton of other comics as well, and now I wish I had picked up more.

I added a number of other prints to my collection, the range of styles on display was just fantastic. I picked up a Detective Conan print which was a Yotsuba parody by papricots (Twitter: @papricots). A gorgeous pastel-y Full Metal Alchemist print by Corrie Young (Twitter: @coryoungart) I couldn’t pass up. A perfectly colorful Joseph and Caesar from JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure Part 2 print by Animus Rhythm had to be added to my pieces. And a rare Slayers print by Kim Madison (Twitter: @deadsidekicks) was a treat to find. I couldn’t pass up a Saint Tail postcard by Chu (Twitter: @chumaruko).

Not surprisingly Fire Emblem Fates stuff was out in full-force. Since I wasn’t all that happy with the game however, I was glad to still see Fire Emblem Awakening stuff about (as usual very little other FE titles). So I picked up a delightful Fire Emblem Awakening fanbook by Emmy (Twitter: @shaburdies). She even drew a little Cherche on the inside cover for me!

Along with the book by Emmy, I got a Splatoon postcard. I saw a number of other squid-related pieces in the alley. I got another postcard, this one advertising the roller by Milkbun (Twitter: @milkbun). And I picked up a squid sisters button by Sara Wawa (Twitter: @sararawawa)

Other buttons I added to my collection are a License-less Rider from ONE-PUNCH MAN button by Voidbug. A Fukurodani logo from Haikyuu!! button by Cosmic Crown. Another set of Joseph and Caesar from JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure Part 2 buttons, these ones by J. Calderone.

No surprise, I got another Link from the Legend of Zelda button but in this one he is using a bow and it was made by Maya Kern (Twitter: @mayakern). I also scooped up a cool Zelda double-sided bookmark (one side was shiny!) by lani (Twitter: @lanimani).

A unique booth by Cara Mcgee (Twitter: @ohcararara) was selling tea blends, each themed after a character from a series. The blends were in tins with custom artwork and made about 3-4 servings. And strangely enough there was tea based on Rainbow Rowell’s novel Carry On. Not anime, but a very unexpected find all the same, and I couldn’t pass it up. I picked up Baz Grim-Pitch tea.

Being me, I rounded things out by buying some dog stuff. I picked up a dog button from Lauren who I’ve gotten things from in the past. And I found a beautiful print of Japanese Spitz breeds by Naomi Romero (Twitter: @NaomiRomeroArt).

Last, but certainly not least, I want to mention Katie Tiedrich (Twitter: @katietiedrich) the artist of Awkward Zombie. She was not in Artist Alley but in the Dealer’s Hall selling books and prints, plus signing and sketching as she did so. When I bought a book, she asked, “Who is your favorite Fire Emblem?” I answered the only correct way, “Lyn.”

~ kate

Filed under: Conventions, Editorials, Events, Otakon

Takano to debut spinoff manga in October

So A Study in Charlotte, an American novel about a young female descendant of Sherlock Holmes, is getting a Japanese release, and it has a cover from a manga artist. I’ve written some thoughts about this method of marketing, which you can read here. Namely, can a cover like this influence people’s perception of the contents inside?

What’s that gentle rapping, rapping at your chamber door? Why, it’s a brilliant new web series that marries the murder mystery of Clue with plenty of deep-cut literary references. In Edgar Allan Poe’s Murder Mystery Dinner Party, the socially awkward writer takes on the role of Wadsworth, orchestrating a night of good times among his fellow famous scribes in which each author must play a character at one of those painfully extended icebreakers, the murder mystery dinner party. But when one of the guests pulls a Mr. Boddy and expires facedown in his soup, the guests must figure out which one of them is playing the role of murderer.

Shipwrecked Comedy is really killing it (pun so intended) with this web series, which is released in 10-to-15-minute long installments. The dialogue is witty, the stakes compelling, the Clue connections undeniable: Louisa May Alcott is almost as awkward as Mrs. Peacock; Mary Shelley certainly evokes Mrs. White with her funereal garb and deadpan delivery; H.G. Wells possesses the quiet ingenuity of Mr. Green while being completely unable to function in normal conversation; and poor, constantly-forgotten Emily Dickinson can’t catch a break, not unlike Colonel Mustard. And while I can’t really assign a Clue analog to George Eliot, the actress playing him is a laugh riot, all overly-machismo swagger and “very convincing” mustache. Ernest Hemingway, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Charlotte Brontë, Oscar Wilde, and Agatha Christie round out the rest of the authors, while sassy ghost Lenore makes a perfect partner in crime (as it were) to Poe, who’s too distracted by the pretty but dumb Annabel Lee to appreciate his non-corporeal companion.

Also, there are moments like this Homeland shout-out that made me giggle uncontrollably:

So far four chapters (all with delightful titles) of the 11-part series have been released. Get caught up below:

While you’re waiting for new installments, you’ll be jitterier than Poe’s narrator listening for the tell-tale heart.

via Boing Boing

Main cast, staff return for new series adapting Tomihiko Morimi's 2nd novel

Meet Natalie Hampton, a 16-year-old Californian responsible for the creation of "Sit With Us," an anti-bullying app launched on September 9, dedicated to eliminating any and all "Mean Girls" situations.

Inspired by personal memories of spending her entire seventh grade school year eating alone, Hampton, now a socially happy junior in high school, believed a cell phone app was necessary in order to eliminate unnecessary rejection.

And the app is already receiving an outburst of positive feedback. "People are already posting open lunches at my school," Hampton told NPR's "All Things Considered," a small act of kindness that will really make a difference in so many lives.

Have a student in elementary, middle, or high school with a smartphone? Spread the word and have them download the app to begin putting an end to bullying. For free.

NEXT: The Must-Know Apps That Will Make Any Woman Feel Safer »

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Photo Credit: Baerbel Schmidt via Getty Images

In June 2016, faculty defenders of the First Amendment faced off against University of Oregon administrators and staff in a symposium originally intended to educate people about the work of the campus’ Bias Response Team. At places like Emory University, University of Oregon, University of California, Santa Barbara and over 100 additional institutions, Bias Response Teams were created to “provide targets of bias a safe space to have their voices heard, to promote civility and respect, to effect change around these important issues in a quick and effective manner and to ensure a comprehensive response to bias incidents.” But according to First Amendment advocates, when the BRT contacted faculty members to talk about complaints that had been made to the BRT concerning—to take one example, derision about the use of gender-neutral pronouns—this created a climate that undermined their freedom of speech. There was little room for discussion at this symposium, recorded for the purpose of podcasting, but a great deal of conversation about the dangers of “safe spaces,” “politically correct thought police” and the “chilling” effects of institutional responses to bias.

What happened on the University of Oregon campus was not an isolated incident, but part of a string of similar incidents that have unfolded over the past two years—in which mostly white, cis men have transformed criticism of their speech and the ideas they propagate from women, queer people and people of color into challenges to their freedom.

As Alice Marwick and Ross Miller point out in an article about online harassment, hateful, defaming or harassing speech is protected by the First Amendment—which has made it extraordinarily difficult for women, people of color and queer people to protect themselves from online harassment. In attacks on campus BRTs and so-called “social justice warriors” (SJWs), conservative students on college campuses are now extending Men’s Rights Activists’ use of the First Amendment to protect their ability to harass and discriminate against marginalized folks.

We asked Ms. if we could publish this article using a pseudonym because of our concern that we will be harassed by Men’s Rights Activists and those who sympathize with them. Our desire for anonymity is at once a symptom of the climate we go on to describe and a by-product of an emphasis on free speech that is proving to be a screen for unethical and vicious on- and offline harassment. These attacks are part of a longer tradition of conservative attacks on campus activists aimed at ridiculing and undermining critiques of sexist, racist and homophobic utterances and practices under the guise of protecting freedom of speech.

Political Correctness, GamerGate and Defenders of the First Amendment

The current attack on campus social justice activists has its roots in the early 1990s, when “political correctness” entered popular culture. The term, originally used on the sectarian left, was revived in 1991 by conservative Allen Bloom in his The Closing of the American Mind. Bloom followed the longstanding anti-communist tradition of suggesting that liberals were policing speech on college campuses. In the subsequent series of articles written by conservative journalists, the 1990s moral panic about political correctness re-animated an older anti-communist trope that saw threats to systems of power from which they had long benefited in struggles for civil rights, economic equality and gender equity. Transforming victimizers (those espousing racist or sexist beliefs that understood people of color and women as being genetically inferior to White men, as in The Bell Curve), critics of political correctness represented themselves as champions of free speech and First Amendment Rights. They were, they claimed, being silenced by left wing criticism when, in fact, they were intent on silencing their critics.

In the summer of 2014, the inheritors of this political legacy once again rallied around the belief that they were the beleaguered defenders of free and open speech and journalistic ethics during a series of incidents that became known as GamerGate. The Men’s Rights Activists campaigns mobilized during GamerGate began in the wake of the suicide and mass shootings perpetrated by Elliott Rodgers in Isla Vista, California in May 2014, notably online protests against the hashtag #yesallwomen.

Online attacks against women gained momentum later that summer, with an aggressive online attack on independent game developer Zoë Quinn. Quinn released the interactive fiction game Depression Quest in February 2013. The game was intended to draw attention to the challenges of living with this illness, but it also drew the ire of male gamers who made it their business to police what counted as a legitimate or “serious” games. When Quinn’s game received positive reviews, online protectors of the integrity of games understood to be serious (e.g. manly) began to grumble and then take shots at Quinn. Motivated by the belief that praise for Quinn’s game resulted not from the merits of her design, but because of Quinn’s relationships with journalists writing about games, the situation erupted in August 2014, when Eron Gjoni, Quinn’s former boyfriend, published an inchoate, meandering post. In it, Gjoni claimed that a favorable review of Depression Quest on the gaming blog Kotaku resulted from Quinn’s presumably sexual relationship with the reviewer.

While this had all the appearance of a tempest in a teapot—a sullen and jealous response to an ex’s success, typical of abusive relationships in which abusers seek to undermine any successes the object of their violent attentions may enjoy—the incident quickly galvanized Men’s Rights Activists, already active in the wake of the Isla Vista shooting. Quinn was subjected to myriad acts of online harassment. She received death threats and was doxxed (e.g. private and identifying information about her was published on the Internet). People who dared to speak up for her and who linked the treatment of Quinn to hostile climates in the gaming and tech industry, like Anita Sarkeesian, Brianna Wu, Felicia Day and Ellen Pao, were subjected to similar forms of harassment. When Zoë Quinn criticized Gjoni, he responded with an attack on SWJs, a group of people described as the direct descendants of the political correctness crowd. Men’s Rights Activists who rallied to support Quinn’s boyfriend used the First Amendment to claim they were ones harmed by GamerGate, despite the very real consequences faced by Quinn and others, including doxxing, online harassment and death threats. Men’s Rights Activists were just exercising their right to free speech, defending themselves against “misandry,” they argued in their defense, apparently unaware of how death threats might make women think more than twice about speaking their minds.

Most significantly for our purposes, GamerGate allowed college dropout and self-identified “faggot” Milo Yiannopoulos to rise to internet fame through the ensuing publicity. Yiannopoulos published “leaked” documents that purported to prove the very forms of corruption within gaming journalism of which Gjoni had accused Kotaku. Yiannopoulos proved an effective poster child for people whose real intent was to promote and defend online harassment. These GamerGate activities led to Yiannopoulos’ gig as the tech editor for Breitbart News in October 2015. Around the same time, Yiannopoulos began to engage in what New York Magazine describes as the “campus-outrage outrage cycle.” In this, Yiannopolous appeared on college campuses, making inflammatory and provocative statements and serving as “free speech bait” to provoke teachers and students into protests. The protests were then picked up by conservative journalists and activists, used to prove that social justice warriors were enemies of free speech and to justify attacks on targeted protestors.

Publicity and Raising the First Amendment Banner

Yiannopoulos’ misogyny has been well-documented. His attacks on feminism have consistently flown under the banner of political correctness and alleged feminist attacks on free speech, as his campus tours have illustrated. In 2015, at the University of Manchester, he debated the topic, “From liberation to censorship: does modern feminism have a problem with free speech?” In early 2016, he went on his self-titled “The Dangerous Faggot” tour, with appearances at Rutgers in February—where he taunted protesters by saying, “you’re idiots if you believe women get paid less than men, or if you believe rape culture exists.” In March, he continued at the University of Pittsburgh, claiming that feminism drew women into lesbianism because they “have a much more malleable sexuality than men do.” Feminists were “man-haters,” he told the crowd, adding that “the Black Lives Matter movement is an act of ‘black supremacy.’” These appearances were publicity stunts intended to provoke feminists, anti-racists, LGBTQ+ activists and their allies into protests that to be used as fodder for the campus-outrage outrage cycle.

Yiannopoulos’ tour, and conservative news coverage of it, uses the First Amendment as a rallying cry for harassment and hate speech. Without the First Amendment as a shiny banner excusing anything that Yiannopoulos or MRAs say about people supporting social justice campaigns on college campuses, their cause appears as nothing more than what it is: aggressive sexism, racism and homophobia. But under the banner of protecting free speech and the First Amendment, these campaigns serve as justification for silencing those who hold opposing viewpoints.

This is more than a rhetorical game. The repressive, silencing consequences of campaigns by people like Yiannopoulos, whose stated goal is “to go through life as offensively as possible,” have been evident in several cases that have unfolded over the past year. In May 2016, conservative news outlets The Daily Caller and Breitbart News reported the resignation of a professor at DePaul with headlines “DePaul Professor Offended By Milo Announces Resignation, Calls Free Speech Delusional” and “DePaul Sociology Professor Angrily Resigns Over Milo Visit”. The professor in question was Dr. Shu-Ju Ada Cheng, an associate professor of sociology who in fact had submitted her resignation in December 2015, prior to Yiannopoulos’ visit.

While Dr. Cheng explained her resignation as a response to DePaul’s failure to address racism in higher education, news stories cited Yiannopoulos’ visit as the cause. This marked the intensification of the “campus-outrage outrage cycle.” Dr. Cheng’s criticism of institutional racism was conflated with Yiannopolous’ visit and she was subsequently demonized in online publications as a villainous enemy in the battle of free speech versus social justice warriors. Although advocates of Yiannopoulos claimed that student protests at DePaul and Dr. Cheng’s letter constituted a threat and “chilling effect” on their free speech, it was Dr. Cheng and students at DePaul who faced significant online harassment in the shape of racist phone calls and death threats.

Consequences of the “Chilling Effect”

While Yiannopoulos has been appearing as the spokesperson for a new movement for free speech, other events over the last year demonstrate how free speech is increasingly being invoked to turn victims into victimizers in the name of journalistic ethics. In November 2015, racial tensions at the University of Missouri culminated in a series of protests, including a hunger strike by graduate student Jonathan Butler and a threatened boycott by the University’s football team. During one particularly volatile protest, Dr. Melissa Click was filmed attempting to protect student protesters from reporters. Conservative news outlets quickly reacted to the video, filmed by Mark Schierbecker, focusing on Dr. Click’s improbable and impetuous call for “some muscle.” The video quickly went viral: here was an open attack on free speech by an actual SWJ, a feminist scholar who had written about Twilight, a text reviled by online misogynists. Dr. Click’s defense of student protesters—who had no reason to embrace conservative journalists who often espoused White supremacist views—was transformed into an attack on all journalists and the figure of the diminutive mother of three calling for “some muscle” became the symbol for SWJ’s real goals: to silence all critics.

The onslaught of media attention and the backlash on campus argued that Schierbecker was the true victim in this scenario. Schierbecker became a rallying point for an existing network of news outlets intent on framing social justice advocates as overly-sensitive defilers of the First Amendment. Schierbecker has gone on to promote himself as a defender of the First Amendment, referring to himself as a “free-speech activist” while contributing to publications with a history of attacking the speech of social justice advocates. In a piece for Breitbart News, Yiannopoulos joined in the fray, calling Dr. Click the “media professor who hates journalists” and helping to contribute to the image of Schierbecker as a victim of social justice warriors intent on destroying the freedom of the press.

In February 2016, Dr. Click was fired from the University of Missouri after outrage in the conservative press, the mobilization of free speech defenders on UM’s campus and their allies in the conservative legislature. That same month, David French published an article in the National Review, identifying Bias Response Teams as enemies of free speech on college campuses. Despite BRT’s stated purpose of promoting civility, respect and understanding, in French’s estimation, Bias Response Teams were actually enemies of the First Amendment.

The attack on BRTs heated up as additional articles on Bias Response Teams swiftly began to appear in conservative publications. In late March 2016, at the University of Oregon, after several faculty members objected to derisive comments on the journalism school’s listserv concerning the Washington Post’s adoption of gender-neutral pronouns, a faculty member called the Bias Response Team for support. The meeting did not go well.

In the wake of additional criticism, several male journalism professors at the University of Oregon publicly began to cry First Amendment as a strategy for diverting attention from the original critiques. At a subsequent panel, a group of professors at the School of Journalism and Communication, including Professor Kyu Ho Youm and former Dean of the School, Tim Gleason, took up French’s concerns that the BRT was chilling free speech. Rather than contributing to dialogue, the Bias Response Team, they asserted, impeded it. With little awareness of the experiences of students facing backlash against growing vocal opposition to buildings named after documented racists and the designation of several campus bathroom as gender-neutral, tenured professors claimed they were the ones being threatened. At a panel discussing the BRT, both Gleason and Professor Tom Wheeler reported fearing the impact of anonymous reports on professors’ careers. Rallying around free speech allowed tenured male professors to claim they were the victims of the BRT, completely obfuscating original charges that tenured male professors were not being respectful in their behavior on the listserv and were, in fact, creating a climate that was hostile for women, people of color and LGBTQ+ people alike. In an article published in June 2016, Professor Kyu Ho Youm dramatically compared the BRT’s visit to “the dispatching of the thought police” and spoke of a UO colleague who “endured a real-life chilling experience with the BRT.”

No one could, of course, point to such “real-life chilling experiences,” save for the obvious discomfort these professors expressed at having been criticized. In fact, there is far more evidence that the people attacked by free speech activists are the ones who are experiencing actual chilling effects. In the case of the Mizzou protests, Black student activists’ experiences of racism on campus, including death threats, were completely subsumed by the media feeding frenzy around Dr. Click. This media feeding frenzy, moreover, resulted in this untenured professor receiving numerous death and rape threats, including the following:

“I hope your mother dies of brain cancer.”

“I plan to belly-laugh when someone shanks you or sets you on fire in the next week.”

“Sport should be made of you, in which you are passed around a cell block for a week straight, then cut loose to be hunted down and killed. If hell exists, I want to be there to take part in your eternal agony. You do not deserve a marked grave.”

“I hope you’re gang-raped by some of the very animals with whom you’re so enamored.”

Conservatives’ discomfort with criticisms of their misogyny, racism and homophobia pales in comparison to the experiences of Dr. Click and other social justice activists in campaigns initiated and intensified by people who, without irony, describe themselves as defenders of free speech. The pattern is evident: First Amendment and free speech activists troll college campuses using high visibility social justice issues like transgender bathrooms, Black Lives Matter and gun reform—even going so far as to promote Yiannopoulos along with gun giveaways at campus events—to draw out potential targets. Although they claim to be protectors of fragile First Amendment rights, their bullying behaviors are evident in the online attacks that follow from the targeting of social justice warriors. In contrast to those claiming to feel a “chilling effect” as a result of educational conversations in an educational institution, people like Dr. Click, Dr. Cheng and supporters of the BRT face a chilling effect of a large-scale network unafraid to send hate mail, death threats and other insinuations of violent retaliation.

Who Is Protected by Defending Free Speech?

Not coincidentally, the ramping up of attacks on campus activists coincides with Donald Trump’s campaign for U.S. president, a campaign full of the kind of rhetoric used by Men’s Rights Activists. Trump , who Yiannopoulos refers to as “Daddy”, has long been an opponent of what he describes as political correctness, which as his campaign unfolds has meant attacks on women, Muslims, immigrants, Mexican-Americans, queer people, racial justice activists and veterans. Arguments made by campus First Amendment activists line up very evenly with Trump’s platform and his devil-may-care attitude toward the effects of his own speech acts.

Domestic violence activists have long understood that the most dangerous moment for people—mainly women—in abusive relationships is when they walk out the door and turn their backs on abusive relationships. In these bitter attacks on social justice, we may well be witnessing the painful uncoupling of social justice activists from forms of journalism that have never served them well.

We have every reason to believe that these attacks will only intensify as faculty, students and staff head back to campuses this fall. We can see already see evidence of this in the formation of a Task Force on the BRT at the University of Oregon and a letter sent to incoming freshman at the University of Chicago stating the university does not condone the creation of “safe spaces.”

We want to offer guidance for those encountering defenders of free speech or grappling with accusations that “social justice warriors” are bullies seeking to quell speech. To begin with, it is vital to recognize that the incidents we’ve discussed, along with many others, are not disparate or isolated incidents. The backlash against Dr. Click, Dr. Cheng, Ms. Quinn and the BRT are part of a wave of organized political activity gathering under the banner of free speech. Because the First Amendment can only be defended in relation to a series of conjured threats to it, free speech “activists” are seeking publicity and public targets as the focus for their crusades. We must not feed the trolls in the hope that if you leave them in the cave, they will eventually eat themselves.

As legal scholars like Alice Marwick, Russ Miller and Sky Croeser have argued, it is also vital to recognize that the First Amendment is not the Word of God. It has its limits and historically has not been friendly to those who would challenge those in power. When free speech is called upon as a rallying cry, we must think of whose speech is being promoted and defended. In GamerGate, the “campus-outrage outrage cycle” and claims to journalistic ethics, free speech is summoned in defense of online harassment and threats. Marwick and Miller contend that hateful, defaming or harassing speech is protected by the First Amendment—yet the effect of such speech repeatedly target particular groups.

“Research suggests that those most likely to be the victims of hateful, online speech are women, sexual minorities, and people of color,” the authors wrote. “In other words, harassment breaks down along traditional lines of power.” In keeping with Marwick and Miller’s argument, attacks against individuals or groups of people perceived to be challenging those in positions of power like Dr. Cheng, Dr. Click and Bias Response Teams function to maintain power structures in higher education that have long allowed those in power to speak without consequences.

Higher education has an ethical and pedagogical responsibility to promote educational opportunities that enhance understanding and inclusion—which is precisely why academics and student activists are being targeted by these campaigns. Better than anyone else, we know that speech has consequences. We know that criticism, grounded in thoughtful consideration and research, plays a vital role in democracy and helps us to refine and advance as a society.

Social justice activists understand, perhaps better than anyone else, how difficult it can be to hear criticism and to learn from it. We are committed to having those conversations on our campuses, but the current defense of the First Amendment is not a defense of open conversation and free speech—it is a defense of harassment and a defense of those who wish to wield inflammatory rhetoric elevating white supremacy, misogyny and homophobia without consequence or criticism.

In the interests of promoting dialogue in which all people are full participants—regardless of their race, sex, gender, sexual orientation or citizenship status—we need to be vigilant and cautious in the dangerous months ahead.

Naomi Osaka is back home in Japan and into the second round of the Japan Women's Open Tennis, and the 18-year-old celebrated in the best way: by joining Twitter.

Story of restaurant that serves cuisine from another world every Saturday

For those who have been thirsty for the worst advice, the Bad Advisor has wonderful, terrible news: Bad Advice will now appear every Tuesday at The Establishment. Read the first installment of brand-new bad advice here, now!

The Bad Advisor will continue to post Good Advice Interludes here on the ‘tumz, and she’ll link y’all every week to the new column in case you forget. (Don’t forget!)

The official English Twitter account for the anime studio P.A. Works noted on Sunday that the cast and staff of The Eccentric Family (Uchōten Kazoku) television...

New manga episode will have story not in manga or film

Blood Lad's Shigeyuki Miya directs at Studio M2 for 2017 premiere

Anime will depict 1st illustration in scrolls showing founding of temple

On Friday night, at Albert Park, in San Rafael, California, the Sonoma Stompers ran onto the pitching mound, hugged one another, laughed, and sprayed champagne. Jose Flores, their six-foot-four closer, had just sailed a fastball by the San Rafael Pacifics slugger Brent Gillespie, leaving the bases loaded and preserving the team’s 5–4 victory. With it, the Stompers claimed the Pacific Association title. Five hundred and ninety-two fans were on hand to watch.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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It took only two days for an algorithm to highlight a fake story about Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly. Facebook’s influence on news dissemination makes such mistakes arguably irresponsible

Two days after Facebook announced it was replacing the humans that write the Trending Topics descriptions with robots, a fake article about Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly appeared in its list of trending stories.

On Friday, Facebook announced that in a bid to reduce bias it would make the Trending feature more automated and laid off up to 26 contractors hired to write and edit the short descriptions that accompanied each trend. On Sunday a story headlined “Breaking: Fox News Exposes Traitor Megyn Kelly, Kicks Her Out for Backing Hillary” found its way into the list of trending stories – despite the fact that it’s not true.

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The California state government passed AJR 43, urging the national government to pass a revenue-neutral carbon tax

Last week, the California state senate passed Assembly Joint Resolution 43, urging the federal government to pass a revenue-neutral carbon tax:

WHEREAS, A national carbon tax would make the United States a leader in mitigating climate change and the advancing clean energy technologies of the 21st Century, and would incentivize other countries to enact similar carbon taxes, thereby reducing global carbon dioxide emissions without the need for complex international agreements; now, therefore, be it Resolved by the Assembly and the Senate of the State of California, jointly, That the Legislature hereby urges the United States Congress to enact, without delay, a tax on carbon-based fossil fuels; and be it further Resolved ... That all tax revenue should be returned to middle- and low-income Americans to protect them from the impact of rising prices due to the tax

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A report launched on 3 August by Unesco’s World Heritage Centre and International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) explores the importance of marine life in the open ocean, which covers more than half the planet

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