| Sunday Night Football Is the Best Show on TV |
[16 Oct 2015|09:53am] |
|
http://www.slate.com/articles/sports/culturebox/2015/10/sunday_night_football_is_the_best_show_on_television_seriously.html On Sept. 10, an audience of 27.4 million tuned into the opening game of the 2015–16 NFL season to watch Rob Gronkowski, the rhinoceros who masquerades as a New England Patriots tight end, trample the defensive secondary of the Pittsburgh Steelers. The game was broadcast by NBC, in a special Thursday edition of Sunday Night Football, the network’s franchise sports broadcast, helmed by play-by-play man Al Michaels and analyst Cris Collinsworth. You could call Sunday Night Football the Gronkowski, the stampeding rhino, of televised sports. For the past four years, it has been the No. 1 program on prime-time TV. It’s ranked first among adults ages 18–49 for five consecutive fall seasons. The show’s dominance is such that its Nielsen numbers appear to have an inverse relationship to the quality of the games it broadcasts. The Fall 2014 season featured the most lopsided games in Sunday Night Football’s nine-year history, with an average margin of victory of more than 18 points. The show still drew an average of 21.3 million viewers; nine of the top 10 individual broadcasts for Fall 2014 were Sunday Night Football games. (The one exception was Fox’s coverage of the seventh game of the 2014 World Series.) Even SNF’s pregame show is a juggernaut. Last year, Football Night in America placed fifth overall among the 18–49 demographic, earning better ratings than all but two nonsports shows, Empire and The Big Bang Theory.
|
|
| Bridge of Spies Is a Cold War Movie With a Message About Guantánamo Bay |
[16 Oct 2015|02:44pm] |
|
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/movies/2015/10/bridge_of_spies_reviewed_tom_hanks_and_steven_spielberg_s_cold_war_movie.html Bridge of Spies, a Cold War espionage thriller directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Tom Hanks, sometimes comes off as a throwback to another era, both political and cinematic: a time when the ideological fault lines between world powers could be confidently drawn in the sand, or a Frank Capra hero could win a whole nation to his side through sheer dint of his basic American decency. But pay close attention to the smartly pinging dialogue (by Joel and Ethan Coen, rewriting an earlier script by Matt Charman): Bridge of Spies is hardly a comfy old wing chair of a movie, designed for contemporary audiences to settle into with a sigh and forget our own geopolitical troubles. This is a film that, though its story (inspired by true events) begins in 1957 and spans a period of about five years, uses that era to hold a mirror to our own.
|
|
| The “We Need More Jessica Mendozas” Bonus Segment |
[16 Oct 2015|04:02pm] |
|
http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/hang_up_and_listen/2015/10/hang_up_and_listen_bonus_segment_sexist_tweets_and_baseball.html This week on the Slate Plus Hang Up and Listen bonus segment, hosts Stefan Fatsis and Mike Pesca welcome Sports Illustrated senior editor Emma Span to discuss the negative tweets that surfaced after Jessica Mendoza’s ESPN debut. What kind of pushback did the MLB’s first female postseason analyst receive via social media? Is this an inevitable response for female commentators, or are attitudes towards women in professional sports changing? And will sexist Twitter users please go away?
|
|
| The “We Need More Jessica Mendozas” Bonus Segment |
[16 Oct 2015|04:02pm] |
|
http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/hang_up_and_listen/2015/10/hang_up_and_listen_bonus_segment_sexist_tweets_and_baseball.html This week on the Slate Plus Hang Up and Listen bonus segment, hosts Stefan Fatsis and Mike Pesca welcome Sports Illustrated senior editor Emma Span to discuss the negative tweets that surfaced after Jessica Mendoza’s ESPN debut. What kind of pushback did the MLB’s first female postseason analyst receive via social media? Is this an inevitable response for female commentators, or are attitudes towards women in professional sports changing? And will sexist Twitter users please go away?
|
|
| Insanity Defense |
[16 Oct 2015|05:01pm] |
|
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/television/2015/10/nathan_for_you_season_3_reviewed.html Nathan for You, Comedy Central’s brilliant, fascinating, and uncomfortable interrogation of manners, capitalism, and the manners of capitalism, returned for its third season Thursday night. In it, as he has so many times before, the unassuming Nathan Fielder attempted to help a struggling small business with a scheme both logical and ridiculous. Methodically following through on this plan, Nathan took careful step after careful step, until he and the business had calmly and willfully wandered into a realm of total lunacy, like a frog hopping from lily pad to lily pad until he arrives in an upside-down world where the sky is purple, the water is yellow, and lily pads are pizzas. As ever, Nathan, an awkward guy in an oxford, doggedly attempts to obey the rules, invariably demonstrating just how absurd and broken those rules are.
|
|
| Why Does Hate Thrive Online? |
[16 Oct 2015|07:29pm] |
|
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/users/2015/10/hate_speech_harassment_and_trolling_online_some_history.html In 1996, John Perry Barlow published the Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. “I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind,” Barlow wrote. “Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live. We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.” Online, the “legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us,” he continued. Barlow envisioned an Internet where all users are created equal—male or female, rich or poor, sweetheart or asshole. “In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits. We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat.”
|
|
| Authoritarianism’s Fellow Travelers |
[16 Oct 2015|08:34pm] |
|
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2015/10/vladimir_putin_s_fellow_travelers_the_russian_president_has_an_assortment.html The World Public Forum’s “Dialogue of Civilizations” meets every year on the Greek island of Rhodes, under the patronage of its founder, Vladimir Yakunin. Until recently, Yakunin was the chairman of Russian state railways and a close ally of the Russian president, Vladimir Putin. Now he has been ejected from Putin’s inner circle, but he still opened the forum in Rhodes earlier this month. When asked, he angrily denied rumors that a hushed-up corruption scandal had led to his fall from grace. Only an “idiot or a provocateur” could possibly say such a thing, he told a reporter from Politico. A few minutes later, he showed the same reporter his 140,000 euro ($159,000) watch. “If you want to buy something, what’s wrong with that?”
|
|
| Who to Root Against in the Playoffs? |
[16 Oct 2015|10:48pm] |
|
http://www.slate.com/articles/sports/sports_nut/2015/10/mets_or_cubs_here_s_who_you_should_root_for_in_the_mlb_playoffs.html With the penultimate round of the Major League Baseball playoffs getting underway, casual baseball fans are faced with a real dilemma: deciding which team to root against. In the Goofus-and-Gallant binary that defines baseball fandom, likable playoff teams are almost always counterbalanced by loathsome ones: overexposed success-mongers with smug and annoying fan bases. But this year’s League Championship Series is historically short on Goofuses: It’ll be only the second LCS since 1996 in which one or more of the Yankees, Red Sox, or Cardinals have not appeared. The Chicago Cubs, the Toronto Blue Jays, the New York Mets, and the Kansas City Royals make this perhaps one of the most likable crops of League Championship Series teams in baseball history.
|
|