Back in the 1990’s, Blockbuster was as much a part of our vernacular as Googling something. If you wanted to have a lowkey Friday evening, you’d just say it was a ‘Blockbuster’ night. At one point they were opening them up at a Starbucks rate, but then times changes, and the massive chain couldn’t adapt quick enough.
I had one left in my hometown of St. Paul, MN that tried hard to stay alive, even selling Snuggies next to the candy aisle until it just gave up and closed back in 2015. I thought they were all gone, but there’s still one Blockbuster left on Earth, and it’s in Oregon.
Last Blockbuster Store On Planet Earth
There are
challenges that come with running the last Blockbuster Video on the planet.
The computer system must
be rebooted using floppy disks that only the general manager — a solid member
of Gen X — knows how to use. The dot-matrix printer broke, so employees write
out membership cards by hand. And the store’s business transactions are backed
up on a reel-to-reel tape that can’t be replaced because Radio Shack went out
of business.
Floppy disks still rule this Blockbuster world.
Yet none of that has kept
this humble franchise in an Oregon strip mall from thriving as the advent of
on-demand movie streaming laid waste all around it. When a Blockbuster in
Australia shuts its doors for the last time on March 31, the Bend store will be the only one left
on Earth.
“It’s pure stubbornness,
for one. We didn’t want to give in,” said general manager Sandi Harding, who
has worked at the franchise for 15 years and receives a lot of the credit for
keeping it alive well past its expiration date. “We did everything we could to
cut costs and keep ourselves relevant.”
The store was once one of
five Blockbusters owned by the same couple, Ken and Debbie Tisher, in three
central Oregon towns. But by last year, the Bend franchise was the last local
Blockbuster standing.
Going the Way of the Dinosaur
It has been quite the fall from movie rental
primacy. In
1989, a Blockbuster store opened every 17 hours. But in the late 2000s, it seemed that the stores were
closing at that same pace not knowing how to keep up with changing times. Just
a handful survived in the past few years since Dish Network bought the company
for $320 million in 2011 and closed most of the remaining locations. The owners
of the Bend store pay a licensing fee to Dish Network.
In the trailer for “Captain Marvel,” which has become its own
blockbuster, superhero Carol Danvers falls to Earth and crashes through a store
roof like a meteorite. The camera pans to reveal the ’90s timeline without
words — Blockbuster’s trademark torn-ticket marquee.
Nostalgia Factor
A tight
budget meant no money to update the surviving store. That’s paying off now with
a nostalgia factor that stops first-time visitors of a certain age in their
tracks: the popcorn ceilings, low fluorescent lighting, wire metal video racks
and the ubiquitous yellow-and-blue ticket stub logo that was a cultural
touchstone for a generation.
“Most people, I think,
when they think about renting videos — if they’re the right age — they don’t
remember the movie that they went to pick, but they remember who they went with
and that freedom of walking the aisles,” said Zeke Kamm, a local resident who
is making a documentary about the store called “The Last Blockbuster” with a
friend.
“In a lot of towns, the
Blockbuster was the only place that was open past nine o’clock, and a lot of
them stayed open until midnight, so kids who weren’t hoodlums would come here
and look at movies and fall in love with movies.”
The Bend store had eight
years under its belt as a local video store before it converted to a
Blockbuster in 2000, a time when this high desert city was still a sleepy
community with a small-town feel to match.
Customers kept coming
back, drawn by special touches like staff recommendations, a “wish list” for
videos to add to the rental selection and even home delivery for a few special
customers who couldn’t drive in. Dozens of local teens have worked there over
the years.
Bankruptcy
Then, in 2010, Blockbuster
declared bankruptcy, and by 2014, all corporate-owned stores had shuttered.
That left locally owned franchises to fend for themselves, and one by one, they
closed.
When stores in Anchorage
and Fairbanks, Alaska, shut down last summer — barely outlasting a Redmond,
Oregon, store — Bend’s Blockbuster was the only U.S. location left.
Tourists started stopping
by to snap selfies, and business picked up. Harding ordered up blue-and-yellow
sweat shirts, T-shirts, cups, magnets, bumper stickers, hats and stocking caps
from local vendors emblazoned with the words “The Last Blockbuster in America,”
and they flew off the shelves.
Closing of Perth Store
Then, this
month, she got a phone call: The world’s only other Blockbuster, in Perth,
Australia, would soon close its doors. A new T-shirt order went out — this time
with the slogan “The Last Blockbuster on the Planet” — and the store is already
getting a new wave of selfie-snapping visitors from as far away as Europe and
Asia.
On a recent weekday,
Michael Trovato of Melbourne, Australia, stopped by while visiting his twin
sister in Bend.
After posing for a photo,
Trovato said he misses a time when choosing a movie meant browsing hundreds of
titles and asking a video clerk for insight instead of letting a
movie-streaming service recommend one for him based on a computer algorithm.
“I miss quite a bit being
able to walk into a Blockbuster or CD store and have that social experience and
see people looking at stuff and talking to people,” Trovato said.
“It’s something you don’t get from the slick presentation of a music service
or, you know, from the internet.”
Don’t Worry, We’re Open
The Bend store doesn’t
seem to be in danger of closing anytime soon.
Its newfound fame has been
a shot in the arm, and customers stream in to buy $40 sweat shirts, $20
T-shirts and even $15 yellow-and-blue beanies hand-knit by Harding herself. The
store pays Dish Network for the right to use the Blockbuster logo and has several
years left on its lease.
People regularly send the
store boxes of old VHS tapes and DVDs. They also donate Blockbuster
memorabilia: a corporate jean jacket, key chains and old membership cards.
Employees always send a
thank-you note, store manager Dan Montgomery said.
Recently, Harding has
noticed another type of customer that’s giving her hope: a new generation of
kids dragged in by their nostalgic parents who later leave happy, holding
stacks of rented movies and piles of candy.
Jerry Gilless and his
wife, Elizabeth, brought their two kids, John, 3, and Ellen, 5, and watched
with a smile as the siblings bounced from row to row, grabbing “Peter Pan” and
“The Lion King” and surveying dinosaur cartoons.
“How could we not stop?
It’s the last one,” said Gilless, of their detour to the store while on
vacation from Memphis, Tennessee. “They need to see that not everything’s on
the iPad.”
Brie Larson’s “Captain Marvel” is racing higher, further and faster in its second week at the box office breaking a dry spell for the industry. The latest Marvel entry in the franchise brought in under $70 million for an on-par drop of 55%. This puts in the same league drop as the “Hunger Games” films. What this really shows is that there wasn’t a whole lot of competition against the film this week so expect more topping of the charts.
This is the type of calmness at the box office, the studios like, but that should diminish the quality and strength of Hollywood seeing how a female superhero can dominate. It took decades for “Wonder Woman” to get to the big screen because of that thinking, but we know how the industry is always late to learn valuable lessons.
“Captain
Marvel” has continued to dominate
the global box office in its second weekend in theaters, leaving newcomers
in the dust.
Walt Disney Studios
estimated Sunday that the intergalactic superhero fell only 55 percent from its
record-breaking opening. This weekend, “Captain Marvel” earned an additional
$69.3 million from North American theaters and $119.7 million internationally, bringing
its global grosses to $760 million.
With Brie Larson in the
title role, “Captain Marvel” has already surpassed
the lifetime grosses of a slew of superhero films including “Justice
League,” ″Captain America: The Winter Soldier” and “The Amazing Spider-Man.”
In a very distant second,
Paramount’s animated family film “Wonder Park” struggled with $16 million
against a reported $100 million budget. Paul Dergarabedian, a senior media
analyst for Comscore, said that it’s hard to compete with “Captain Marvel,”
which is playing to all ages and audiences. But the PG-rated pic about a girl
who dreams up an amusement park did not score well with critics either — it’s
currently sitting at a 30 percent on Rotten Tomatoes.
But it wasn’t all bad news
for the films in “Captain Marvel’s” shadow. The Cole Sprouse and Haley Lu
Richardson film “Five Feet Apart” opened in third place with $13.2 million in
ticket sales, which is nearly double its production budget. The film from
Lionsgate and CBS Films is centered on two teens with cystic fibrosis.
Audiences were
overwhelmingly female (82 percent) and young (65 percent under age 25 and 45
percent under 18). That the stars involved, like Sprouse who is in the popular
TV show “Riverdale,” have a strong fan base and social following motivated
young women to turn out to the theaters.
“You don’t always have to
be No. 1 to have a success,” Dergarabedian said. “And ‘Five Feet Apart’ proves
that.”
It was a good weekend
overall for Lionsgate, which had three films in the top 10, including “Five
Feet Apart,” Tyler Perry’s “A Madea Family Funeral,” which landed in fifth
place with $8.1 million (behind “How To Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World”)
and the Spanish-language newcomer “No Manches Frida 2,” which opened on only
472 screens and grossed $3.9 million to take sixth place.
“In the world of everybody
talking about diversity, this is a great example of a diverse lineup. All three
films were completely different, which was obviously a strategic distribution
decision,” said David Spitz, Lionsgate’s president of domestic distribution.
“Those three films were able to capture an audience even with the 300-pound
gorilla of ‘Captain Marvel.’”
Not so lucky was “Captive
State,” an alien invasion thriller from Focus Features that floundered in seventh
place with $3.2 million against a $25 million budget.
But overall, things are
finally looking up for the industry-wide box office. The “Captain Marvel”
effect has lowered
the year to date deficit nearly 10 percent in a week.
“We’re on the right track
now. It shows when you’re this early in the year, any change can make a
significant difference to the bottom line,” said Dergarabedian. “But it’s going
to take more than one big movie to start us toward another record-breaking year
in North America.”
One film that might help:
Jordan Peele’s “Get Out” follow-up “Us” hits theaters next weekend and is
tracking for an opening north of $40 million.
Estimated ticket sales for
Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to Comscore.
Where available, the latest international numbers for Friday through Sunday are
also included. Final domestic figures will be released Monday.
1. “Captain Marvel,” $69.3
million ($119.7 million international).
2. “Wonder Park,” $16
million ($4.3 million international).
3. “Five Feet Apart,”
$13.2 million ($189,000 international).
4.“ How to Train Your
Dragon: The Hidden World,” $9.3 million ($9.4 million international).
5. Tyler Perry’s “A Madea
Family Funeral,” $8.1 million ($65,600 international).
6. “No Manches Frida 2,”
$3.9 million.
7. “Captive State,” $3.2
million ($64,400 international).
8. “The LEGO Movie 2: The
Second Part,” $2.1 million ($2.1 million international).
9. “Alita: Battle Angel,”
$1.9 million ($4 million international).
10. “Green Book,” $1.3
million ($17.1 million international).
Worldwide Box Office
Estimated ticket sales for
Friday through Sunday at international theaters (excluding the U.S. and
Canada), according to Comscore:
1. “Captain Marvel,”
$119.7 million.
2. “More Than Blue,” $41.3
million.
3. “Green Book,” $17.1
million.
4. “How To Train Your
Dragon: The Hidden World,” $9.4 million.
In America, we often don’t hear about mass shootings anymore unless they’re on a large scale since they’ve become a nearly weekly event. President Donald Trump refuses to say there is a problem if the shooter is a white supremacist or racist, but if the culprit is darker than a brown shopping bag, he’ll quickly say something needs to be done. Remember the National Guard (Christopher Paul Hasson) that had a list of Democrats and journalists to kill? Neither does Trump.
This is why it came as a shock but no surprise when Brenton Tarrant live streamed his attack on Friday attacking a mosque in New Zealand. Stills from the stream look more like a first person shooter on PS4 or Xbox One. That’s how it’s gotten for us in America. We get angry for a day, but then we know nothing will be done just like in years past after every other major shooting.
Internet Age Terrorism
The
suspected New Zealand shooter carefully modeled his attack for an internet age.
He live-streamed the massacre, shouted out a popular meme slogan and published
a long,
rambling manifesto replete
with inside jokes geared for those steeped in underground internet culture.
All that makes Brenton
Harrison Tarrant, the man charged with murder for the attack Friday on
mosques in Christchurch, the latest person to allegedly commit mass slaughter
alongside a targeted appeal to online communities that breed extremism.
Prior to killing six people in Isla Vista, California, in 2014, Elliott Rodger posted an online video and circulated a lengthy document full of grievances. He was later found to have ties to a misogynistic online group known as “incels,” or “involuntary celibates,” who sometimes call for violence against women. Last year, Robert Bowers, the man charged with killing 11 people at a Pittsburgh synagogue, posted threats on Gab, a social media site popular with white supremacists.
Online Recruitment
Recruitment with and
proliferation of extremist ideals is nothing new — in person or online. People
who want to discuss such ideas are bound to find each other, said Daniel Byman,
a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute. But whereas small groups might have
once met up in real life, now people can go online and find large groups to
reinforce and encourage their ideas almost instantly.
People do things online
that they might be hesitant to do in real life, Byman said. That can range from
harmless acts, such as emailing someone you would be too intimidated to
approach at a party, to sharing, building on and encouraging
extremist views and violence.
“It enables you to be
bolder,” Byman said.
Online sleuths quickly
connected the livestreamed video to posts made by the same user on 8chan, a
dark corner of the web where those disaffected by mainstream social media sites
often post extremist, racist and violent views.
Manifesto
Tarrant’s manifesto (which you can read here) spread quickly on 8chan Friday. The 74-page screed espouses white supremacist views even as it contradicts itself. Some saw similarities to the 1,500-page manifesto written by Anders Behring Breivik, a Norwegian right-wing extremist who killed 77 people in 2011.
The Tarrant document
seemed intended to feed the online communities he took part in, in part by
“trolling” common internet themes and outlooks with ironic mockery.
“Were you taught violence
and extremism by video games, music, literature, cinema?” Tarrant asks himself
in the essay.
“Yes, Spyro the dragon 3
taught me ethno-nationalism,” he writes, seemingly sarcastically. That passage
references a video game for Sony’s PlayStation console intended
for children 10 and up.
“Fortnite trained me to be
a killer and to floss on the corpses of my enemies,” he continued, only to
abruptly contradict himself in a classic trolling move: “No.” Fortnite is a
popular online battle game.
Online Radicalization
Mary Anne Franks, a law
professor at the University of Miami and president of the Cyber Civil Rights
Initiative called for greater oversight of social platforms after Tarrant’s
manifesto and attack.
“It’s pretty clear the
person involved here was radicalized online,” she said. “The conversations in
these chat rooms and message boards, with in-jokes and memes, are part of a
cultivation of a certain kind of radical person in these spaces.”
Still, it can be hard to
pin his actions on his behavior online, said Hannah Bloch-Webha, a law
professor at Drexel University. “I don’t think society understands enough about
the role of propaganda and violent speech in provoking actual violence,” she
said.
In a live-streamed video
of his attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, the shooter says
“Remember, lads, subscribe to PewDiePie.” That’s a reference to Felix
Kjellberg, a popular YouTuber who has faced considerable controversy of his own
over videos that included anti-Semitic jokes and Nazi imagery .
But again, Tarrant’s
meaning wasn’t straightforward, since he was repeating a popular internet meme
crafted to help PewDiePie claim the largest number of followers on YouTube.
Kjellberg condemned the attack in a tweet Friday and said he was “sickened” by
the use of his name.
Livestreaming Terrorism
The act of livestreaming
the attack was in itself a sign of how far internet
culture has permeated the physical world. People regularly stream daily
events now, said Byman of the Brookings Institute, including their
confrontations with law enforcement.
The shooter did his
research, said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal
Center, a Jewish human rights organization. “He found information online, he
found validation, he found an ideology and a purpose in life that led directly
to what he did,” Cooper said.
Social media is at the
center of this increasing challenge, he said. Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and
other sites that allow people to upload their own content have faced fierce backlash
for letting violent and hate-filled posts and videos spread.
The companies eventually
halted the spread of the New Zealand shooting livestream Friday. But many say
they were too slow, and argue the video shouldn’t have gone online in the first
place.
Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook is undergoing plenty of new changes in their fight to regain customers and profits after a rough year dealing with privacy issues. Their new changes look to limit newsfeeds which has led to longtime product chief, Chris Cox, leaving the social media giant. Or was it the criminal investigations that have just begun?
Revenge Porn AI
Facebook is rolling out new technology to make it easier to find and remove intimate pictures and videos posted without the subject’s consent, often called “revenge porn.”
Currently, Facebook users
or victims of revenge porn have to report the inappropriate pictures before
content moderators will review them. The company has also suggested that users
send their own intimate images to Facebook so that the service can identify any
unauthorized uploads. Many users, however, balked at the notion of sharing
revealing photos or videos with the social-media giant, particularly given its
history of privacy failures.
The company’s new machine
learning tool is designed
to find and flag the pictures automatically, then send them to humans to
review.
Facebook and other social
media sites have struggled to monitor and contain the inappropriate posts that
users upload, from violent threats to conspiracy theories to inappropriate
photos.
Facebook has faced harsh
criticism for allowing offensive posts to stay up too long, for not removing
posts that don’t meet its standards and sometimes for removing images with
artistic or historical value. Facebook has said it’s been working on expanding
its moderation efforts, and the company hopes its new technology will help
catch some inappropriate posts.
The technology, which will
be used across Facebook and Instagram, was trained using pictures that Facebook
has previously confirmed were revenge porn. It is trained to recognize a
“nearly nude” photo — a lingerie shot, perhaps — coupled with derogatory or
shaming text that would suggest someone uploaded the photo to embarrass or seek
revenge on someone else.
At least 42 states have
passed laws against revenge porn. Many such laws came up in the past several
years as posting of non-consensual images and videos has proliferated. New
York’s law, which passed in February, allows victims to file lawsuits against
perpetrators and makes the crime a misdemeanor.
Facebook has been working
to combat the spread of revenge porn on its site for years, but has largely
relied on people proactively reporting the content up until now. But that means
by the time it’s reported, someone else has already seen it, chief operating
officer Sheryl Sandberg said in an interview with The Associated Press. And
it’s often tough and embarrassing for a victim to report a photo of themselves.
“This is about using
technology to get ahead of the problem,” Sandberg said.
Facebook still sees
user-contributed photos as one way to address the problem, and says it plans to
expand that program to more countries. It allows people to send in photos they
fear might be circulated through encrypted links. Facebook then creates a
digital code of the image so it can tell if a copy is ever uploaded and deletes
the original photo from its servers.
The company does not
expect the new technology to catch every instance of revenge porn, and said it
will still rely on users reporting photos and videos.
Facebook Overhaul Sees Chris Cox
Exit
Facebook is
losing its product chief Chris Cox, a top-ranking executive who spent more than
a decade at the company, just a week after CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a
major new direction for the social network.
The departure, announced Thursday ,
follows Zuckerberg’s announcement that Facebook will shift its emphasis to private messaging over public sharing. The change
reflects Facebook’s changing audience and continued problems with serving as a
conduit for misinformation and vitriol.
Cox, 36, worked closely
with Zuckerberg through the company’s ups and downs, having joined up about 20
months after Facebook was hatched in 2004 in Zuckerberg’s Harvard dorm room.
Cox “is a great guy who is
someone who has always tried to do good,” said David Kirkpatrick, an author who
became well acquainted with Cox and Zuckerberg while writing a book about
Facebook. “My guess is there was some sort of disagreement. He would not be
leaving at this challenging time if there wasn’t something else going on.”
Neither Cox nor Zuckerberg
specified what led to their split.
“Most all my personal
highs and lows of the last decade have been tied up in the journey of this
company, with Mark, and with so many of you,” Cox wrote in
a post. “This place will forever be a part of me.”
Zuckerberg said Cox first
mentioned he might leave a few years ago but decided to stay on after 2016 as
evidence emerged that Russians had manipulated Facebook’s services to provoke
discord in the U.S. and influence the election won by President Donald Trump.
“I will always appreciate
his deep empathy for the people using our services and the uplifting spirit he
brings to everything he does,” Zuckerberg said of Cox in his parting note.
Like many other longtime
Facebook executives, Cox is unlikely to ever have to work again if he doesn’t
want to. He pocketed $310 million in gains from exercising Facebook stock
options from 2014 through 2017 alone, according to the company’s filings with
securities regulators.
Zuckerberg also announced
another departure — Chris Daniels, who had been overseeing Facebook’s encrypted
messaging service WhatsApp. Daniels is leaving less than a year after WhatsApp
founder Jan Koum resigned in an apparent dispute with Zuckerberg over the future
direction of the widely used messaging service.
Facebook isn’t hiring
another executive to replace Cox. Instead, the leaders of the Facebook,
WhatsApp and Instagram apps that Cox oversaw will report to Zuckerberg.
Longtime Facebook executive Will Cathcart will take over Daniels’ job running
WhatsApp.
Zuckerberg wants to evolve
Facebook’s messaging apps into private forums where people can communicate
without worrying about what they are sharing being seen and shared by others.
That effort will include
introducing WhatsApp encryption technology to Facebook’s Messenger app and
Instagram’s messaging option. Zuckerberg is also promising to make photos and
posts automatically disappear from public view.
Facebook’s social network
and Instagram photo app won’t change, and will remain available for sharing
places, adventures and minutiae with a broader audience.
Forrester analyst Jessica
Liu said it sounded like Cox was “subtly disagreeing” with Zuckerberg’s privacy
memo, based on Cox’s farewell post. “Facebook Inc. is a massive and evolving
company, so it’s only natural that in a company that large, not everyone will
agree with every strategic change,” she said.
Facebook Facing Criminal Investigation
The New York
Times reports that federal prosecutors are conducting a criminal
investigation into Facebook’s data deals with major electronics
manufacturers.
The newspaper says a grand
jury in New York has subpoenaed information from at least two companies known
for making smartphones and other devices, citing two unnamed people familiar
with the request. It reports that both companies had data partnerships with
Facebook that gave them access to the personal information of hundreds of
millions of users.
Facebook describes those
data deals as innocuous efforts to help smartphone makers provide Facebook
features to users before the social network had its own app.
The Times reports that it
is not clear when the inquiry began or exactly what it is focusing on. Facebook
did not respond to a request for comment.
If your living space is too small but you nevertheless have the urgent desire to install a large plasma or 4K LED display panel, then the installation of a special drop-down TV lift made of linear electric actuators will solve the problem. This construction provides vertical movement for the TV monitor. The whole mechanism of it was designed to simplify the life of those, who like watching TV but dislike staring at a black display when it is turned off. Now when it’s not in use, the display can be hidden away from view.
The set of materials and tools needed to bring the idea of a drop-down TV lift depends on the size of the TV panel itself, as well as the weight of the device. Luckily, TV’s nowadays are much lighter, so it’s even easier than ever to install.
Materials and Tools Needed:
Profile (channel for a particularly large TV panel). The quantity must be calculated so that there is enough for welding a rectangular carriage to fit the TV screen, as well as for two vertical strips that will be mounted on the wall or the back side of the wood dressing, plus two or four jumpers between them;
Fasteners (screws, dowels), an eye bolt (for fastening a rope);
Pencil;
Welding machine;
Ruler, protractor, and level;
Screwdriver;
Drill;
An electric motor;
Electric linear actuator;
Electric relay;
Bracket with pulley and small cable
A locking mechanism that snaps when after a monitor to hide away.
Step 1
In the beginning, the major measurements are needed. You have to calculate meticulously the distance between all four holes for mounting the screen, as well as the length of the guide rails distance. Remember that old rule, measure twice, drill once.
Step 2
The second important step for your TV lift is making the frame to affix the TV screen on it. Welding a rectangular square of channels of appropriate size or create a mounting plate, depending on which material you’ve chosen.
Step 3
After making the frame for your TV, do the relevant marking on the surface of the back wall of the cabinet or the screen holder which it will be attached. If the surface to hold your guide rails is the wall, you will have to install the dowels first. After that, you will have to attach guide rails to it with screws. Before starting the next stage of work, it is worth checking once again how well the TV screen carriage drives along the guides. If necessary, the profile edges of the guide rails should be bent a bit with pliers.
Step 4
Now, the TV screen needs to be attached to a bracket with a pulley and small cable. This must be connected to a linear actuator powered to an electric motor through the electric relay. The mechanism for your TV screen lift is set from inside of the pedestal or cabinet if it must be raised from below. Optionally, it can also go into the ceiling if the screen must be lifted to be hidden behind it.
Progressive Automations provide the whole range of linear electric actuators suitable for your DIY TV lift mechanism. Moreover, in the spectrum of goods available, there are also motorized TV lifts for 32” and up to 95” sizes of a TV screen. Linear electric actuators are already preinstalled in these products. Stroke, force, and speed – all these specifications are available to check ahead of time. This will help to avoid any mistakes and to pick up the actual one you need. Enter the luxurious world of automation technologies now.
“Project Runway” fans had assumed that the show would fade into the sunlight when the Harvey Weinstein issue hit. Many thought that it was past its prime anyway and had stopped watching. The big question now is will those same fans who abandoned the show be willing to give it a second chance?
“Project Runway” arrived on television at the end of 2004, the same year that Mark Zuckerberg created a website called The Facebook at Harvard. In 2007, Apple released the first iPhone. Three years later, when “Project Runway” was in its seventh season, Instagram appeared in the App Store.
That tech-history lesson is to say:
2019 looks a whole lot different from 2004. So when Bravo reacquired the rights to
“Project Runway” last year, the network wasted no time in recalibrating the
show, which will have its premiere on Thursday.
The most significant of the changes
is the cast.
Tim Gunn and Heidi Klum, whose faces have been synonymous with “Project
Runway,” announced last September that they would not
return to the show and that they are developing a new fashion series with
Amazon, where viewers will be able to buy the styles they like through the
website. Zac Posen, who replaced the designer Michael Kors, also departed. Nina
Garcia, now the editor of Elle, is the only remaining member of the original
cast.“Heidi
and Tim were the originals, and I enjoyed working with them,” said Shari
Levine, the executive vice president for current productionat Bravo. “But
this is 15 years later. It’s important that the show evolve and look to the
next generation.” Die-hard fans may embrace the new cast or see them as
impostors, but Bravo’s picks carry significant credentials.
The new host
is the supermodel Karlie Kloss, who is also the founder
of Kode With Klossy, a nonprofit that hosts coding camps for
girls around the country. Christian Siriano, who won the “Project Runway”
competition in its fourth season and made a name for himself as a designer to
the stars and a champion for inclusivity, is the new mentor.
Joining Ms. Garcia on the judges’ row
are Elaine Welteroth, who is the former editor of Teen Vogue, and the designer
Brandon Maxwell, who most recently made a splash dressing Lady Gaga for the
Oscars.
Cardi B Guest Spot
Guests will include the rapper Cardi
B and Dapper Dan, who in the 1980s and ’90s made “knockups” using
the Gucci logo without permission and who has recently made a buzzy comeback
with a Harlem atelier and an authorized Gucci collaboration.
Bravo is surely counting on these casting choices to help revive the
show’s ratings. According to Nielsen, Season 5 drew the most viewers: almost
3.6 million per episode. By Season 16, the last to air, the audience was
roughly half that.
Zaftig #MeToo Problems
Though
“Project Runway” was ahead of the curve in some ways — bringing in a designer
who incorporated magnets, cameras and other technology into her work, for
instance, or asking contestants to make clothing from waste (a Heron Preston move before Heron Preston) — the show
also had moments best left in the past. Fans will remember an episode in which
Mr. Gunn called a model “zaftig” and then elaborated, saying, “She’s a little
large.”
Today Mr. Gunn would be
swiftly “canceled” across social media for such a
comment. The culture has changed. And one of those changes — the #MeToo
movement — is in part the reason the show is back on Bravo.
Weinstein Problems
“Project
Runway” was owned by the Weinstein Company, which declared bankruptcy last year
after dozens of women accused Harvey
Weinstein of sexual
misconduct that spanned decades. Though the show ran on Bravo for its first
five seasons, the Weinstein Company signed a deal in 2008 to move
it to Lifetime.
But after allegations
against Mr. Weinstein became public in 2017, Lifetime’s parent, A&E
Television Networks, accused the Weinstein Company of breaching its
contract and ended all of its obligations to the show, including the airing of
Seasons 17 and 18.
In May 2018, a Delaware bankruptcy court approved a bid from Lantern Capital Partners to acquire the
Weinstein Company’s assets. Days later, Bravo announced that
“Project Runway” would return.
10 Years Of Lifetime
“It’s been
on another network for 10 years, but if you asked a lot of people, they would
tell you it’s a show on Bravo,” Ms. Levine said. “We defined it, and it defined
us.”
A long-running criticism of “Project Runway” is that over a
14-year run, it produced only one high-profile designer: Mr. Siriano. Many of
its contestants opened boutiques or started their own lines, but none reached
the mainstream recognition of Mr. Siriano.
“A lot of people went to
design school and wanted to become designers because of that show,” said Fern
Mallis, the industry executive widely credited with organizing New York Fashion
Week (and who appeared on “Project Runway” several times as a guest judge). “On
the other hand, it falsely created a sense that if you sew two pieces of fabric
together, you’re a designer.”
Ms. Mallis added that many
of the challenges tested the contestants’ artistic abilities but not their
understanding of the moneymaking side of fashion. “Your business still has to
manufacture, deliver and price items correctly,” she said.
Season 17 Changes – Bigger Prize
Pack
Some of the changes in the
17th season nod to those concerns. Bravo has increased the prize money to
$250,000; thrown in a mentorship with the Council of Fashion Designers of
America, which runs the main New York Fashion Week calendar; and added a “flash
sale” component to some of the episodes, which will allow viewers to purchase
the top looks, as decided by them and the judges.
“One of the
disconnects about the previous show was that if you loved it, you couldn’t
necessarily buy it,” Mr. Maxwell said in a phone call. The change was both a
response to the new culture of consumerism — items are a click away — and a way
to engage the audience in real time.
“Everything is changing in retail,”
Ms. Kloss said over breakfast at Mercer Kitchen in SoHo in February. “Here we
are in SoHo, and there are so many vacant spaces.”
Ms. Welteroth, sitting next to Ms.
Kloss, chimed in. “You cannot underestimate the power of the digital
revolution,” she said. “Before, there was no dialogue unless you were writing a
letter and snail-mailing it in. Now you hear the voices of the people you’re
reaching instantly. That gives the consumer or the reader much more power. You
can no longer ignore marginalized voices who are saying, ‘Hey, this doesn’t
reflect me, this offends me, this doesn’t include me.’”
She added: “You can sell online
without ever getting the approval of Vogue.”
Ms. Welteroth, who is credited with
reinventing Teen Vogue as a more socially conscious,
politically engaged publication, noted that designers have to be conscious of
the world around them. “You have to be mindful of what is happening and really
conscious in how you create and what stories you’re telling,” she said.
Design Issues
To that end, one of the challenges on
the new “Project Runway” will ask each designer to think about and create
designs for an issue they want to champion. The new show also strives to
reflect a broader swath of experiences.
“I’m really proud we have women of all shapes and sizes and the first
transgender model in ‘Project Runway’ history,” Ms. Kloss said. “Fashion should
serve everyone.”
The new
judges said they adjusted to their roles quickly, each finding a personal
rhythm and style. “Brandon would have, like, really funny stuff,” Ms. Welteroth
said of Mr. Maxwell’s design notes. “Like, ‘cowgirl goes to SoulCycle.’ Or he
would just put a big ‘No.’ One time Nina left early, and we looked at her
cards, and we were, like, ‘Wow.’ We saved them. They were so good.”
Ms. Kloss turned to Ms.
Welteroth. “Your notes were, like, there was not an ounce of space left on the
card,” she said. “I would just have three words.”
For all the changes, some
things stay the same, even in the “one day you’re in, one day you’re out” world
of fashion. “I felt like all I talked about was fabric,” Mr. Siriano said of
his time as a mentor. “The importance of choosing the right fabric,” he said,
“will exist till the end of time. Satin doesn’t change.”
And besides, he said, “If you can’t pick one fabric for one challenge, how are you making a collection four times a year for customers around the world?”
Heidi Klum Takes Tim Gunn To Amazon
Off to Amazon…
After serving 16 seasons as judge, host and Executive Producer of “Project Runway,” some fans are wondering what happened to Heidi Klum. Just as Bravo announced bringing the show back to its original network, Klum and Tim Gunn quickly announced they wouldn’t be returning. The stylish duo are launching a whole new project with Amazon Prime Video.
“After 16 incredible seasons, I am saying ‘Auf Wiedersehen’ to Project Runway, a show that I was honored to host and help create,” Heidi announced back in September 2018. “I’m most excited that my journey with my dear friend and colleague, Tim Gunn, is far from over. We will be partnering with Amazon for a new show, and we’re excited for everyone to see what we’re designing next!”
Although details on Heidi and Tim’s upcoming Amazon show are pretty limited, People reports that the series will be a “fresh take” on competition-based reality TV and, of course, will center around fashion. The show will also involve a “shoppable experience” for Amazon viewers. According to Variety, the new project has opened casting to designers worldwide in order to help bring more of a focus to global fashion and design. The outlet reported that the series only begins filming this summer, so it will still be a while before it makes its way to fans’ TV screens.
Supernatural was back from its mini-hiatus last week finally. I absolutely loved the last few episodes, so “Ouroboros” had a tough act to follow. It turned out to be an episode with some excellent moments and it definitely held my interest throughout, but there were a bunch of head-scratching moments and we all know I don’t like those. On the other hand, I was thrilled to have Rowena back on my screen, so that combined with some great emotional scenes left me at least intermittently happy.
The episode, written by Steve Yockey and directed by cast
favorite Amyn Kaderali, starts with a memorable scene (perhaps not for my
preferred reasons, but…), a mostly shirtless barefoot dude cooking with some
good music playing. I love the way it’s filmed and directed, almost like a
sorta sexy version of a cable tv cooking show. Except, because this is Supernatural, it turns out barefoot dude
is cooking a recently murdered man and slicing and breading and frying his
organs and popping out his eyeballs for a snack. I literally said “ewwww” out
loud. A new high for Supernatural’s
enjoyment of making its fans have to stop eating their traditional pie slices.
It was a well done opening, though, and I’d sort of like Noah (very well played
by Phillippe Bowgen) if he wasn’t so busy eating people.
Team Free Will Plus (TFW+) arrive too late and are
understandably frustrated. Rowena gives Cas a flirty “Hello, Castiel”, and gets
a puzzled look in return, which was sort of adorable. Then we unfortunately get
our first head scratching moment. Rowena is the only one who notices that the
corpse (and apparently the other similar corpses they’ve found) has black
around his lips and really, the Winchesters didn’t notice that??? Too busy
focusing on the cannibalism to, what? Be hunters??
Head scratch. Grrrr.
Rowena dispenses some wisdom to Jack when he asks if the
black around the lips means something.
Rowena: Dear
boy, everything means something.
She’s right, and Sam and Dean and Castiel know that,
Show. We ALL know that!
There’s an overt (maybe too overt) theme running through
the episode of “I’m fine, everyone’s fine” which starts with Rowena and Sam in
the next scene as they research who this monster might be and why he always
knows they’re coming. As they work, Rowena questions how Jack is okay and what
kind of magic they used, and Sam just says ‘he’s fine’. She also wonders how
Dean is managing to keep an Archangel locked up in his head.
Sam: Because he’s Dean. And Dean is…. Dean. He’s fine.
Of course he isn’t, but that’s sort of the point.
Meanwhile, Dean and Castiel have a diner chit chat while
Jack is in the bathroom coughing up blood ominously. Cas is empathic with Dean,
saying he can’t imagine the willpower it’s taking to keep Michael locked up,
but Dean insists he’s fine.
Dean: That’s
what I’m supposed to say, right?
Me: In this
episode, yes, definitely.
Dean insists that it’s on him to keep it up, even if it
means no sleep, but Cas protests.
Dean: It’s on
me.
Cas: No,
it’s on us. We’re here to help you.
It’s a nice gesture, but Sam and Cas actually can’t do a
damn thing to help Dean other than let him keep hunting to stay distracted. But
as Castiel rightly notes, it’s not sustainable.
Jack uses up some more of his soul in the bathroom to
heal himself and returns to the table, also insisting he’s fine.
Dean: See?
Everyone’s fine.
Me:
Everyone is so not fine.
Things are going well and then I have to stop and scratch
my head again. Castiel notes that the killings have been ritualistic, almost
liturgical. Dean and Jack stare blankly and I start to yell obscenities at my
television because really? Dean doesn’t know what liturgical means? With all
the angels and devils and weird religious things they’ve come across? I never
ever enjoy it when Show dumbs down the Winchesters, so I didn’t enjoy that
little bit at all.
There was a fair amount of humor in this episode, which
is odd for such a grisly one, but then again, Supernatural is good at that. I did enjoy the AV Club discussion
and thought the humor worked well in that scene without anyone having to be
dumbed down (Jack isn’t stupid, he’s just young and inexperienced). Cas
explains to Jack that AV Club is a club for people who don’t play sports.
Dean gestures at Cas.
Dean: Like
him, he’s AV Club.
I laughed out loud, but Rowena corrected all of us for
fooling around.
Rowena: We have
more pressing things than your hilarious banter.
Me: Yes
ma’am.
Oh Rowena, I always love your lines – and Ruth Connell’s
delivery.
Dean also gets to look not-so-knowledgeable, so head scratch
again, when Sam and Rowena figure out that Noah is a Gorgon.
Dean: Like Medusa!
Rowena: You
know about Medusa?
Me: Who
doesn’t know about Medusa??? Come on, Show!
Unfortunately, Dean only seems to know the Clash of the
Titans version, which while awesome, I can’t believe is the only knowledge of
Medusa he’s run across. Sigh.
Meanwhile, another well done scene. Noah flirts his way
into a trucker’s front seat and gives him a kiss, which unfortunately for the
trucker is not foreplay but rather venom that paralyzes him so Noah can pop out
an eyeball while he’s still horrifically alive and EWW once again. Kudos to
Phillippe for hitting just the right notes in his flirtation and then in his
brutally efficient dispatching of the trucker.
Dean and Cas don their FBI aliases at the murder scene
and intimidate the rather freaked out local cop (That’s the most intimidating
we’ve seen Castiel in a while, and I liked it). Now the story gets weird,
though. Noah inexplicably left a note for Dean (I guess he can hear in his
visions of the future and Sam called his brother by name perhaps?) Anyway, the
note is oddly specific. It says ‘I see you standing alone by the truck’ which –
why would anyone write that? Why mention
standing alone? He goes on to say he
sees Dean and the tall man and the red haired witch, all of which is a fairly
contrived way for the good guys to figure out that Gorgons can’t see angels.
Jack (indignant): I’m not
an angel!
Close enough apparently.
Contrived or not, that gives them a way to have Cas and
Jack sneak up on Noah, but not before Rowena shows her actual care for TFW+ by
insisting they have some anti-venom with them to counteract the Gorgon’s
paralysis if need be. She comes up with a way to get it worthy of the best
fanfic, and the Rowena/Sam shippers out there must have been beside themselves.
Sam and Rowena play the mom and dad of an adorable little dog, getting into a
spat in front of the vet so she takes their dog in the back for an exam just to
calm them down. I loved every minute of it. Jared and Ruth together are always
amazing, and every time Rowena calls him “Samuel” I grin.
Vet: What’s
his name?
Rowena and Sam: Jack
Rowena: Our wee
Jackie boy.
Dog: Glares
Of course it’s actually Jack, who has to endure getting
his temperature taken before the vet leaves the little (supposedly sick) dog up
on the exam table (unlikely) and goes to check in with “mom and dad”. They get
the venom, and Rowena gets a clue about the powerful and “volatile” magic
that’s glued to Jack.
Meanwhile, Noah finds another victim. Noah is actually
one of the most interesting MotW’s they’ve had in a while, which was a real
strength of the episode. The tied up guy cries that the Gorgon has been killing
“helpless men” and Noah sneers.
Noah: Helpless
men? That’s rich. I like women too, but they’re so cautious these days. Must be
from waking up from all those years of misogynistic oppression.
I thought I was watching The Magicians for a second
there, I liked that dialogue so much. That’s a big compliment, Mr. Yockey.
Jack and Cas head off to surprise Noah, while Sam calls
the bunker and checks in with Maggie.
Sam: Thanks
for stepping up and handling things while I’m gone.
Me: Really?
Maggie is in charge? Why?
I have no clue why they keep putting a former civilian
who has never been that proficient a fighter in charge of all these AU hunters.
It makes zero sense and it drives me nuts.
Cas and Jack break in, Noah is sassy and stalls for time
while Cas helps the tied up man, telling Jack the story of the black snake and
the chicken who hard boiled the last of her own eggs in order to choke and kill
the snake who kept eating them.
Noah to Jack: I can’t
tell if you’re the chicken or the snake…
Noah gives Cas a peck on the cheek and Cas falls down
paralyzed, which kind of surprised me. Apparently Noah’s a demi-god, but I
still didn’t think his venom would work on an angel. Sam and Dean show up and join the fight but
get overpowered, Noah tossing Sam across the room and then brutally slamming
Dean’s head against the wall repeatedly and never mind I take it back, I do NOT
like Noah at ALL!
Sam: Dean!!
(I love that they always call out for each other when the
other one is being attacked)
Noah thinks he’s won, but Jack surprises him and
decapitates him in a really nicely done scene. All the kudos Mr. Kaderali.
Sam to Jack: Check
on Cas, I’ve got Dean.
Jack tries the anti-venom, but it doesn’t work and he
panics and heals Cas with his own power.
Cas: Jack,
no!
Across the room, Sam tries desperately to wake his
brother, which breaks my heart.
Sam: Wake
up, hey, Dean…
(Whenever one of them is distraught over the other and trying to make them okay, they always say “hey, hey” and their brother’s name, and it breaks me every single time. I don’t think Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles even know they’re doing it, and that just breaks me more.)
Sam finally turns to Cas and Jack, his voice panicked.
Sam: Guys!
They race back to the bunker and carry Dean to his bed,
but Cas can’t heal him or even see what’s going on inside his head.
Jack wants to help, but Cas warns him not to burn off too
much of his soul.
Sam:
(helplessly) So what do I do?
Rowena: Clean
his wound, make him comfortable.
Me: Sobs
Sam dabs at his brother’s forehead, tries to comfort him
as he stirs and fights and then falls back down. I hate seeing Sam so helpless
and so concerned, having thwarted Dean’s self sacrifice only to maybe lose him
to a fistfight with a Gorgon.
Castiel and Jack have an emotional conversation in Jack’s
room. Jack too is distraught at seeing Dean so helpless.
Jack: I hate
seeing him like that. He’ll be okay, right? He’s Dean…
Castiel doesn’t sugar coat it, though he’s very gentle
with Jack.
Cas: Sam and
Dean are extraordinary, brave, special humans. But they are human. Humans burn
bright but for a very short time.
Jack is angry, asks what’s the point then?
Castiel: The
point is that they were here at all. When they’re gone, it will hurt, but
remind you of how much you loved them.
I loved this scene. It was well written, and all the
words rang true for this episode but seemed to carry a larger meaning too,
about that time in the hopefully distant future when we will all have to say
goodbye to Sam and Dean (and Cas too, despite his angelic status). That line
was beautiful, and very true. Misha Collins delivered it flawlessly, with just
the right amount of emotion but also conveying the perspective of a being for
whom the lives of the Winchesters are a small part of his total existence.
That pivotal line reminded me of one of my favorite Buffy
lines, “the hardest thing in this world is to live in it.”
Jack is learning that now, the hard way. Cas tries to
explain the snake story to Jack, saying that it’s about being willing to give
up the thing you love to kill the thing you hate.
And that’s a bit of foreshadowing if I’ve ever heard it!
At that moment they hear Dean yelling and go running. Sam
is trying to calm Dean down as he trashes the room.
Sam: Dean,
it’s okay, you’re in the bunker!
Dean: I know
where I am!
He turns to Sam, his eyes wide, horrified.
Dean: He’s
gone. Michael’s gone.
A part of me was relieved, but Dean is immediately both
distraught and self-blaming.
Dean: It’s my
fault! I told you to let me take that coffin ride!
I wanted to cry at this scene, because Dean doesn’t
really blame Sam, he blames himself. He’s angry at himself, and he lashes out,
and Sam is right there. And it’s true that Dean did fear all along that this
would happen, but he also couldn’t just stand there and see Sam sobbing and so
broken at the thought of losing his big brother. (Just like Sam has also taken
similar risks for the same reason). The horrible thing is, Dean blames himself
– but Sam blames himself too. He knows that Dean gave up his self sacrificing
plan for him, because he begged him not to go through with it. I don’t think
Sam would ever change his mind and go along with dumping his brother in the
ocean locked up with an archangel for all eternity, but he must feel incredibly
guilty, so Dean’s impulsive lashing out hits terribly hard.
I feel for both of them so much in this moment, and at
the same time – that right there is why I watch this show. The Winchesters will
fight to the end to save each other, no matter what, and I am here for it every
single time.
I think Cas is mostly with Sam on this one; Dean clearly
thinks that even if Sam can’t let him sacrifice himself, that Cas will, but I’m
not so sure. At the very least, Castiel would also wait until every avenue is
exhausted before he would go along with such a plan. When Dean turns to Cas and
Sam and lashes out, I think it hits the angel pretty hard too. All three of them are pretty devastated here.
Me too, to be honest.
Screams from the other room and they go running. Bodies
are on the ground, seemingly all the AU hunters who were in the bunker, and
Maggie comes running in, yelling for Sam. In front of his horrified eyes, she’s
killed by Michael – who is now in the form of Rowena!
Dean (brokenly): No….no…
RowenaMichael: Hello,
boys.
I thought that was an interesting choice to have Michael say Crowley’s line while in the form of Rowena. It made me miss Mark Sheppard though. Ruth Connell said at the convention this weekend that she wanted to do an American accent to play Michael but they told her not to. Not sure why, because I immediately wondered why Michael now sounded more like Rowena – why would his accent change with the vessel? Hmm. I also didn’t entirely follow why Rowena said yes, but suffice it to say it was because Michael correctly surmised that she does care about Sam, Dean, Castiel, and Jack. Though he also said he always intended to doublecross her and he thinks she knew that, so a bit of a head scratch there.
Michael tortures Sam, Dean and Castiel, taking their
breath and then striking them blind. Dean still forces out a strangled “Sam?”
when that happens, which – Winchesters. Then Jack makes a decision, clearly
having heard Castiel’s message about the snake and the chicken story loud and
clear. He decides it’s “worth the cost”
and takes on Michael.
I thought Ruth and Alex (and Amyn and Steve) did a great
job in the confrontation scene, Michael denigrating Jack by calling him a
child.
Jack: I am
not a child. I am the son of Lucifer. I am a hunter.
He pauses, and then delivers the line that packed a lot
of emotion for everyone on screen and most of us watching too.
Jack: I am a
Winchester!
cap @WilliamJTV
And with that, he kills Michael and consumes his grace.
Dean: Jack?
Jack turns around, looking eerily serene.
Jack: Michael
is dead. I’m me again.
And we see the shadow of black wings unfurl behind him.
Fade to black.
That was a dramatic scene and well played, but much of
fandom was disappointed that Michael, the Big Bad of the season, was dispatched
so quickly and seemingly easily. I was confused as to why Jack was even able to
do that now since he’s seemed on the verge of collapsing recently instead of
getting stronger.
We’re left with a lot of questions. Is Michael gone? Or
has he just taken possession of a Nephilim? Why is Jack keeping the snake? What
will Jack be like now after ingesting Michael’s grace?
It’s an unexpected place to be for the last six episodes
of the season, that’s for sure. But I’m curious to see what this week’s episode
brings!
Summer is right
around the corner and most of us are already planning to get the best summer
getaway experience. While others wanted to go to the beach, going out of town,
going camping or hiking, some people wanted a real adventure to begin with. If
you want a real escapade and an alternative way to saddle up your summer
experience, then head to one of the most popular horse racing this year which
is Preakness Stakes will surely take your summer experience to a whole new
level.
Happening this May
2019, the latest edition of Preakness Stakes will surely take your breath away
as it showcases different kinds of festive events. From balloon festivals,
fashions shows, and crab races, the Preakness Stakes 2019 will not fail you in
giving a great show of the world’s most competitive three-year-old thoroughbred
horse racers.
Now as you go along
and plan to pack your bags and experience an action-packed show in the upcoming
Preakness, let’s take a look at to some things you have to expect as the second
leg of the Triple Crown series about to unfold very soon.
Pimlico, Baltimore Spring Fashion Show
The Spring Fashion Show that will be held in Pimlico during the Preakness Stakes 2019 is a showcase of women who partake the horse racing industry. During the fashion show, you will experience a venue full of shops, ongoing races, and lunch buffet. Also, some proceeds of the show will go to a nonprofit organization namely The Foxie G which rescues abandoned horses and cats.
Old Hilltop Sunrise Tours
One of the most
jaw-dropping scenic view you can experience during Preakness in the Hilltop
Sunrise Tours. Once you take the tour, you’ll be able to see the horses,
jockeys, trainers, and owners heading to train their entries for the Preakness
race.
The Alibi Breakfast
It’s the Preakness
pre-breakfast event held before the Preakness race starts. If you haven’t seen
the trainers, jockeys, and owners during the Hilltop Sunrise Tours, you will have
the chance to meet them again in the Alibi Breakfast.
Budweiser Infield Party
It’s a party where
you can feel the excitement of the horse racing show as the DJ’s on their mix
while toasting a drink. You’ll have the chance to dance and party with a lot of
horse racing fans during the event showing your full swag and groove on the
race track.
The Preakness Title
As a horse racing
fan, the best way to celebrate and enjoy Preakness is to show off the best
outfit you kept in your closet for a long time. Wear the fanciest rodeo hat you
have and those horse racing inspired outfits. It’s a contest you can partake
and you might have the chance to earn the title of Preakness Stakes 2019.
The Triple Crown Cocktail Hour
It’s a showcase of
the Preakness most relish cocktails inspired by the Triple Crown series. You
can enjoy touring to the distillery display with experts crafting the most
delicious and mouth-watering cocktail mixes.
Mt. Washington’s Tavern’s Preakness
Party
It’s a neighborhood
of Pimlico, Baltimore that commemorates the annual celebration of Preakness
Party. The same thing you expect as to what Preakness looks like, you will be
able to experience a full cocktail party hosted by a Kentucky non-profit
organization. Truly, this is a pre-Preakness experience you can join before
heading to the racing day.
Along with the mixed
cocktails you can enjoy during this party, you can also try their snack
platters and specialty drinks serve for everyone. There is also a booth where
you have the chance to buy inexpensive souvenirs like rodeo hats, outfits, and
Preakness accessories.
The 2019 Preakness Stakes Party
This is the most
exciting part of the Preakness 2019. You will be able to experience a full
party with a mix of exclusive drinks being served to all. You can taste the
variety of foods that only Preakness can serve. There are programs where you
can join like fashion shows, slot games, and so on. The event throws out big
prizes which you might earn.
At the same time, the
2019 Preakness Party also is a fundraising event and proceeds support the
programs held by local youth in Baltimore. Surely, the Preakness 2019 party is
a combination of entertainment and charity.
The Preakness Balloon Festival
It’s also a sought
after the event that happens in the annual celebration of Preakness. The
festival showcases a total of twenty-five hot air balloons filled with wine
garden and beer. During the show, you will be able to see the county’s finest
local foods, vendors, kid zone, and live music which composes the whole event.
The Preakness Sunset Derby Party
It’s a celebration of
live horse betting. You will also see an exclusive DJ ’s hanging and banging to
their loudest music. Lounge bars,
specialty drinks, and buffets are also available during the sunset derby party.
Box office analysts speculated that Marvel’s “Captain Marvel” might be the film to save 2019’s dismal box office, and they were absolutely correct. Brie Larson’s superhero was unstoppable in its worldwide box office debut this weekend.
Before it opened, it had already broken the record set by DC/Warner Bros. with “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice” appearing on 4,242 with “Captain Marvel” being shown on 4,310 theater screens. Unlike “Batman v Superman,” which opened strong but died quickly after bad word of mouth hit, Marvel’s latest entry is being given an ‘A’ by audiences exiting the film. Not even what are called anti-SJW could stop this runaway money train. Expect it to reign in the top 5 for the next 2 months.
“Captain Marvel,” Marvel Studios’ first female-fronted superhero movie, launched with $153 million domestically and $455 million globally, according to studio estimates Sunday, making it one of the biggest blockbusters ever led by a woman.
It also sets a new
worldwide mark for a film directed or co-directed by a woman. “Captain Marvel”
was helmed by the filmmaking team of Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, who previously
made the indies “Half Nelson” and “Mississippi Grind.”
“Captain Marvel” is the first film in the franchise dedicated to the story of a female superhero. DC-Warner Bros. and their Gal Gadot-led “Wonder Woman” broke a comic book glass ceiling in 2017, but “Captain Marvel” had an even stronger opening, bringing in over $50 million more than “Wonder Woman,” which sold around $100.5 million in tickets during its opening weekend. While DC-Warner Bros. hired a single woman — Patty Jenkins — to direct “Wonder Woman,” Disney-Marvel’s movie split directing duties between Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, who wrote the script with Geneva Robertson-Dworet.
Brie Larson’s Carol
Danvers, a character who first debuted in Marvel Comics in 1968, had never
before made it into the movies and was previously lesser known than many Marvel
heroes. But “Captain Marvel,” which came in at the high end of the Walt Disney
Co.’s expectations, ranks as one of Marvel’s most successful character debuts.
An origin story whose soundtrack trades in the likes of Salt-N-Pepa and Nirvana, “Captain Marvel” is set principally in 1990s California, where Larson’s hero crash-lands and eventually teams up with Nicholas Fury, a government agent familiar to Marvel fans and here played by a younger-looking, digitally rejuvenated Samuel L. Jackson. Ben Mendelsohn, Jude Law, Annette Bening, and Lashana Lynch play other major roles.
Only “The Avengers”
movies, “Black Panther,” ″Captain America: Civil War” and “Iron Man 3” have
opened better in the Marvel cinematic universe.
“She definitely pushed us
higher, further, faster,” said Disney distribution chief Cathleen Taff.
“Captain Marvel” rocketed
up other record
books, too. It’s the sixth largest worldwide debut ever. The only movie
with a female lead that’s opened better globally was “Star Wars: The Force
Awakens,” which grossed $529 million when it debuted in 2015.
Like the “Force Awakens”
sequel “The Last Jedi,” ″Captain Marvel” had to tangle with trolls who sought
to lessen the film’s impact. Some fans claimed Larson’s hero didn’t smile enough,
a charge she responded to with doctored pictures of previous male Marvel
superheroes with awkwardly full grins. Others took issue with Larson’s
statements about making her press interviews for the film more inclusive and
not “overwhelmingly white male.”
The anti-“Captain Marvel”
campaign included the flooding of Rotten Tomatoes audience scores,
which artificially drove down the film’s score to 55 percent fresh from more
than 44,000 votes as of Sunday. To combat the down-voting issue in advance of
“Captain Marvel,” Rotten Tomatoes (which doesn’t require users to verify that
they’ve seen a movie that they’re scoring) removed the ability to rate movies
prior to release.
Taff declined to address
“Captain Marvel” foes but applauded Marvel and Kevin Feige for propelling a
movie that expanded the Marvel universe.
“What they believe is that
the more you diversify perspective and experience in front of and behind the
camera, the better the movies and the stories are,” said Taff of Marvel. “You
see that in their track record. I think you see that in their box office. And I
think you see that in the broadening of their fan base.”
CinemaScore, which relies
on interviews with audience members coming out of theaters, found crowds very
much liked “Captain Marvel,” giving it an A rating. Reviews were less
enthusiastic but still good, landing 79 percent fresh on Rotten Tomatoes.
It was easily the best opening of any movie thus far in 2019. The box office had been frigidly cold coming into the weekend with ticket sales down 26 percent, according to Comscore. “Captain Marvel” single-handedly chopped almost 5 percent off that figure with a weekend that overall was up 47 percent from the same last year.
“The box office year of
2019 officially started
this weekend,” said Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst for Comscore.
“We’re going to have one of the biggest box-office years ever but looking at
the first two months, you wouldn’t know it.”
Audiences in the U.S. and
Canada for “Captain Marvel” were 55 percent male and 45 percent female.
International grosses were especially strong, led by $89.3 million in China,
where “Captain Marvel” trailed only “Captain America: Civil War” and “Avengers:
Infinity War” among Marvel releases.
For Disney, it’s a strong
start for a year littered with tentpole releases, some of which are sure to
surpass “Captain Marvel,” including: “Avengers: Endgame,” ″Toy Story 4,” a
remake of “The Lion King” and the next “Star Wars” movie.
Last week’s top film, “How
to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World,” slid to a distant second place in its
third weekend of release with $14.7 million. In its second weekend, Tyler
Perry’s “A Madea Family Funeral” dropped 55 percent with $12 million. It’s made
$45.9 million in 10 days.
“Captain Marvel” scared away any new wide releases. Vincent D’Onofrio’s directorial debut, “The Kid,” was largely overlooked by moviegoers. It sold $505,000 of tickets in 268 theaters.
For Disney, Marvel Studios
has made close to $18 billion worldwide. “Captain Marvel” is a boost
for the movie industry, which has gotten off to a sluggish start this year. The
2019 North American box office was down 26% heading into Friday. Because of
“Captain Marvel,” this weekend’s box office totals were up roughly
50% compared to the same weekend last year, according to Comscore.
A24′s “Gloria Bell,”
Sebastian Lelio’s remake of his own Chilean drama, opened strongly in limited
release with $154,775 in five theaters. The film stars Julianne Moore and a
middle-aged Los Angeles divorcee.
“Apollo 11,” the acclaimed
moon landing documentary featuring newly discovered and restored footage,
continued to pack theaters. It made $1.3 million from 285 locations, including
many IMAX screens.
North American Box Office
Estimated ticket sales for
Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to Comscore.
Where available, the latest international numbers for Friday through Sunday are
also included.
1. “Captain Marvel,” $153
million ($302 million international).
2. “How to Train Your
Dragon: The Hidden World,” $14.7 million.
3. “A Madea Family
Funeral,” $12.1 million.
4. “Lego Movie 2: The
Second Part,” $3.8 million.
5. “Alita: Battle Angel,”
$3.2 million.
6. “Green Book,” $2.5
million.
7. “Isn’t it Romantic,”
$2.4 million.
8. “Fighting With My
Family,” $2.2 million.
9. “Greta,” $2.2 million.
10. “Apollo 11,” $1.3 million.
Worldwide Box Office
Estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at international theaters (excluding the U.S. and Canada), according to Comscore:
1. “Captain Marvel,” $302
million.
2. “Green Book,” $28.3
million.
3. “How to Train Your
Dragon: The Hidden World,” $21.7 million.
4. “Alita: Battle Angel,”
$11.6 million.
5. “Natsume’s Book of
Friends the Movie: Ephemeral Bond,” $10.4 million.
President Donald Trump continues working his way past 10,000 untruths since taking office in 2017, and this past week, he truly topped himself in front of an adoring crowd. It’s easy to do that when the only people fact checking you are considered ‘the enemy of the people.’
Trump uttered a dizzying number of false statements in his especially long weekend speech, to an audience that didn’t seem to mind at all. At last count, we had 60 blatantly false statement he made in just over two hours.
He got the unemployment
rate wrong. He misstated his winning margin in the election. He reprised some
of his most frequently told fictions and dusted off old ones, even going back
to the size of his inauguration crowd.
A look at some of his
words in his two-hour-plus speech to the Conservative Political Action
Conference on Saturday:
UNEMPLOYMENT
TRUMP: “We’re down to 3.7 percent unemployment, the lowest number in a long
time.”
THE FACTS: The unemployment rate is 4 percent. It was 3.7 percent in
September.
DIVERSITY VISAS
TRUMP: On the diversity visa lottery program: “They send us the people they
don’t want.”
THE FACTS: A persistent falsehood. “They,” meaning other countries, do
not select citizens for the U.S. program. Foreigners decide on their own to
apply for it. They must meet education or skills benchmarks to apply and those
who are tentatively selected through the lottery must pass background checks
before being confirmed.
Trump attributed similar
characteristics to migrant caravans from Central America, suggesting
governments try to get rid of their bad people by putting them in caravans for
the U.S. Again, migrants are self-selected, not told to march to the U.S.
RUSSIA INVESTIGATION
TRUMP: Special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigative team has “13 of the
angriest Democrats in the history of our country.”
THE FACTS: Mueller is a longtime Republican and party affiliation cuts
both ways — or no way at all — in the varied background of the team. Some have donated
campaign money to Democrats. The team is not known to be particularly or
historically angry.
CROWD SIZE
TRUMP on what he considers false reporting about his crowd sizes: “They did
the same thing at our big inauguration speech. You take a look at those crowds.
…We had a crowd, I’ve never seen anything like it. … There were people
(from) the Capitol down to the Washington Monument.”
THE FACTS: The National Park Service released dozens of photos of the
crowd gathered for his inauguration ceremony and it was clear from them that
crowds did not extend to the Washington Monument from the Capitol. Large swaths
of empty space were visible on the National Mall.
The park service also
released photos from President Barack Obama’s two inaugurations, showing that
his 2009 event far outstripped the number of people who attended Trump’s
inauguration.
It released the photos in
response to news media requests made through the Freedom of Information Act
after Trump and his aides accused news organizations of framing or timing
photos and video to make it look like not many people came.
JAMES COMEY
TRUMP: “Every single Democrat said Comey should be fired” for his handling of
the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails late in the campaign. Senate
Democratic leader Chuck Schumer “called for his resignation many times.”
THE FACTS: Not true. Democrats did not universally — or even broadly —
call for Comey to be fired despite their anger over his decision to go public
before Election Day with news that the FBI had renewed its investigation of
Clinton’s handling of her emails. Several Democratic lawmakers did want him
out, but they were a distinct minority.
Schumer said he had lost
confidence in Comey but did not urge his removal, telling Bloomberg News he
wanted to speak with the FBI chief “to restore my faith.” The House Democratic
leader, Nancy Pelosi, also held off on asking for Comey to step down, while
musing: “Maybe he’s not in the right job.” Trump fired him months later.
GREEN NEW DEAL
TRUMP: “No planes, no energy. …Perhaps nothing is more extreme than the
Democrats’ plan to completely take over American energy, and completely destroy
America’s economy through their new $100 trillion dollar Green New Deal. …It
would end air travel.”
THE FACTS: He’s ignoring the actual provisions of the plan, which would
not ban air travel or end traditional sources of energy. The plan, backed by
some liberal Democrats but greeted cautiously or opposed by others in the
party, does call for a drastic drop in greenhouse-gas emissions from fossil
fuels such as oil, coal and natural gas.
Trump is extrapolating
from a fact sheet that initially accompanied the plan, then was disavowed and
withdrawn by its sponsors. It proposed building high-speed rail at a scale
“where air travel stops becoming necessary.”
2016 ELECTION
TRUMP, on his Electoral College win: “We didn’t get to 270. We got 306.”
THE FACTS: Trump misstates the Electoral College vote in his 2016
presidential race against Democrat Hillary Clinton. The official count was 304
to 227, according to media outlets tally of the electoral votes in every state.
CHINA-TRADE
TRUMP: “We’ve lost so much money with China — $500 billion a year. And on
trade, it’s such a disaster. It’s $507 billion a year. China — just one
country. We lose with everybody, almost. But China is one country — $507
billion, for many years.”
THE FACTS: He’s off by several hundred billion dollars on the trade deficit with
China . Trump typically ignores one part of a trading
relationship, services, and considers only the other part, goods. Even by that
measure, he’s wrong. On goods alone, the U.S. ran a trade deficit of $382
billion with China last year, not $507 billion. That was up from nearly $376
billion in 2017.
The U.S. is strong on
services and ran a $40 billion surplus with China on that form of trade in
2017. So the actual trade deficit with China that year was $335 billon.
HEALTH CARE
TRUMP: “We have some great private coverage. And we have initiated some
incredible plans, like the new cooperative plan, where you get better insurance
than Obamacare for a fraction of the cost.”
THE FACTS: He’s glossing over the limitations of his administration’s
expanded health care options, which involve both short term and association plans. They
offer lower premiums than comprehensive plans such as those under the
Affordable Care Act but cover less.
Short-term plans don’t
have to take people with medical conditions or provide benefits such as
coverage for maternity, mental health, prescription drugs and substance abuse
treatment. Association health plans do have to accept people with pre-existing
medical conditions, but they don’t have to cover the full menu of 10
“essential” kinds of benefits required by Obamacare.
Gary Claxton of the
nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation says short-term plans may turn out to be
more costly than Trump administration officials suggest. The plans now cover up
to 90 days, but if insurers expand them to offer up to 36 months’ coverage, the
companies will be taking on more risk. “You’ll have to pay more up front
because there’s a longer time during which you could get sick,” he said.
MIDTERM ELECTIONS
TRUMP: “We were given no credit. I can’t go and campaign for all of the people
in the House. There’s too many.”
TRUMP, on his endorsement of Florida candidate for governor, Ron DeSantis: “I
said, ‘Ron, Don’t make me do this, Ron.’ ‘Sir, I can win.’ Alright, Ron, here
we go. Because I know if he loses — which almost never happens when I endorse
someone, almost never. Only one time, that was because it was done in the
middle of the day of the election… But we very rarely lose.”
THE FACTS: Trump is wrong to suggest that almost every candidate he
endorsed and campaigned for in the November midterm elections — except for
perhaps one — won.
Two Republicans whom Trump
strongly backed in their Senate races — Montana’s Matt Rosendale and West
Virginia’s Patrick Morrisey — lost to Democratic Sens. Jon Tester and Joe
Manchin, respectively. Trump had visited Montana four times and West Virginia
three times to rally voters. Trump also campaigned for two other Senate losers:
incumbent Sen. Dean Heller of Nevada and Leah Vukmir in Wisconsin.
In the House, Republican
Rep. Jason Lewis lost his race in Minnesota to Democrat Angie Craig, whom he
had defeated by 2 percentage points in 2016. Trump endorsed Lewis and
campaigned for him.
VETERANS
TRUMP, on the Choice program for veterans: “I got that approved after 44 years
of being unable to get it approved for our veterans.”
THE FACTS: False. Congress approved the private-sector Veterans Choice
health program in 2014 and President Barack Obama signed it into law. Trump is expanding
it.
TRUMP: “We are taking care of our veterans like they have never been taken care
of before. We just got them Choice so they can now go see a doctor. Now they
can go see a doctor instead of waiting on line for weeks and weeks and weeks.”
THE FACTS: Veterans still must wait for weeks.
While it’s true the VA
recently announced plans to expand eligibility for veterans in the Veterans
Choice program, it remains limited due in part to uncertain money and longer
waits.
The program currently
allows veterans to see doctors outside the VA system if they must wait more
than 30 days for an appointment or drive more than 40 miles to a VA facility.
Under new rules to take effect in June, veterans will have that option for a
private doctor if their VA wait is only 20 days (28 for specialty care) or
their drive is only 30 minutes.
But the expanded Choice
eligibility may do little to provide immediate help.
That’s because veterans
often must wait even longer for an appointment in the private sector. Last
year, then-Secretary David Shulkin said VA care is “often 40 percent better in
terms of wait times” compared with the private sector. In 2018, 34 percent of
all VA appointments were with outside physicians, down from 36 percent in 2017.
Choice came into effect
after some veterans died while waiting months for appointments at the Phoenix
VA medical center.
SHUTDOWN
TRUMP: “I flew to Iraq — the first time I left the White House, because I
stayed at the White House for months and months because I wanted the Democrats
to get back from their vacations from Hawaii and these other places.”
THE FACTS: Trump actually left the White House plenty of times during
the “months and months” surrounding the partial government shutdown that began
Dec. 22.
Besides his trip to Iraq
and Germany on Dec. 26-27, Trump traveled to the Mexican border town of
McAllen, Texas, on Jan. 10. On Jan. 14, he also went to New Orleans to address
the American Farm Bureau. He’s left the White House during the five-week shutdown
for meetings at Camp David and the Capitol.
Shortly before the
shutdown began, he traveled to Philadelphia to watch the Army-Navy football
game (Dec. 8), visited Kansas City for a law enforcement conference (Dec. 7),
attended former President George H.W. Bush’s funeral at the Washington National
Cathedral (Dec. 5), participated in the G-20 summit in Argentina in late
November; and hosted “Make America Great Again” rallies in Mississippi with
Senate candidate Cindy Hyde-Smith (Nov. 26). He hosted a dinner on Thanksgiving
at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has always loved making big announcements, but his latest attempt at patching up his privacy problems on the social media giant was relegated to a blog post. (which you can see in full below)
The Facebook co-founder seems ready now to let users do what he did back in 2015. Growing uncomfortable with all of his old messages resurfacing, Zuckerberg made all of his Facebook messages and chats disappear overnight. It wasn’t noticed until some people reported that their past conversations with him were now one-sided.
While it sounds good in theory, privacy promises from the social media giant have been broken time and time again. Remember that Anonymous login idea, and the ‘clear history’ button has never come to fruition after being announced last May.
After
building a social network that turned into a surveillance system, Facebook CEO
Mark Zuckerberg says he’s shifting his company’s focus to messaging
services designed to serve as fortresses of privacy.
Instead of just being the
network that connects everyone, Facebook wants to encourage small numbers of
individuals to carry on encrypted conversations that neither Facebook nor any
other outsider can read. It also plans to let messages automatically disappear,
a feature pioneered by its rival Snapchat that could limit the risks posed by a
trail of social media posts that follow people throughout their lives.
It’s a major bet by
Zuckerberg, who sees it as a way to push Facebook more firmly into a messaging
market that’s growing faster than its main social networking business. It might
also help Facebook ward off government regulators, although the Facebook CEO made
clear that he expects the company’s messaging business to complement, not
replace, its core businesses.
But there
are plenty of obstacles. Facebook has weathered more than two years of
turbulence for repeated privacy lapses, spreading disinformation, allowing
Russian agents to conduct targeted propaganda campaigns and a rising tide of
hate speech and abuse. Zuckerberg submitted to two days of grilling on Capitol
Hill last April. All that increases the challenge of convincing users that
Facebook really means it about privacy this time.
Encrypted conversations
could alleviate some of those problems, but it could make others worse.
Security is an “admirable goal,” said Forrester Research analyst Fatemeh
Khatibloo. “I’m just not sure it addresses the bigger issues Facebook is facing
right now.”
Facebook grew into a
colossus by vacuuming up peoples’ information in every possible way and
dissecting it to shoot targeted ads back at them. Anything that jeopardizes
that machine could pose a major threat to the company’s share price, which
would also affect its ability to attract and retain talented engineers and
other employees.
In a Wednesday interview
with media outlets, Zuckerberg predicted Facebook’s emphasis on privacy will do
more to help the company’s business than hurt it. While most of the stock
market slipped in Wednesday trading, Facebook’s shares gained $1.25 to close at
$172.51.
The Facebook CEO has been
telegraphing some of these changes to investors for the past six months, but
his Wednesday blog post is the first time he has explained the idea to the more
than two billion people that use Facebook’s services and look at its ads. Those
ads are expected to generate $67 billion in revenue this year, according to the
research firm eMarketer.
If everything
falls into place, Facebook will also display similar advertising on the
privacy-protected messaging services. Those services are also likely to offer
other moneymaking features, such as a digital wallet, as Facebook attempts to
build something similar to Tencent’s popular WeChat service in Asia.
“If you think about your
life, you probably spend more time communicating privately than publicly,”
Zuckerberg said in his interviews. “The overall opportunity here is a lot
larger than what we have built in terms of Facebook and Instagram.”
That’s far from proven.
While Facebook has already tried to show ads in the Messenger app, it’s seen
only limited success, and hasn’t even tested the concept in WhatsApp since it
acquired that service for $22 billion in 2014.
“There are some huge
unknowns about how successful Facebook is going to be rolling advertising into
a more private messaging environment,” said eMarketer analyst Debra Aho
Williamson.
Some critics are convinced
that Facebook has become so powerful — even a threat to democracy as well as to
people’s privacy — that it needs to be reined in by tougher regulations or even
a corporate breakup.
But unraveling Facebook
could become more difficult if Zuckerberg can successfully stitch together the
messaging services behind an encrypted wall.
“I see that as the goal of
this entire thing,” said Blake Reid, a University of Colorado law professor who
specializes in technology and policy. He said Facebook could tell antitrust
authorities that WhatsApp, Instagram Direct and Facebook Messenger are tied so
tightly together that it couldn’t unwind them.
Combining the three
services also lets Facebook build more complete data profiles on all of its
users. Already, businesses can already target Facebook and Instagram users with
the same ads, and marketing campaigns are likely coming to WhatsApp eventually.
Facebook’s focus on
messaging privacy raises other concerns. Messaging apps have in the past helped
fake news and rumors spread fast, sometimes with deadly consequences. A report from University of Oxford researchers
last year found evidence of widespread disinformation campaigns on chat
applications like WhatsApp. In one particularly brutal example, the Indian
government last year accused WhatsApp of fueling rumors that led to
lynchings and mob violence that wounded dozens.
Facebook responded by
restricting the number of groups to which a message could be forwarded and
labeling forwarded messages as such. On Wednesday, Zuckerberg said that
Facebook needs to protect both privacy and safety as it encrypted messaging
services, although he noted to an “inherent trade-off” between security and
safety, simply because Facebook won’t be able to read encrypted conversations.
And in some cases,
Facebook could allow some content to automatically disappear in a day or two,
as if it were a fleeting mirage.
“Some people want to store their messages forever and some people think having large collections of photos or messages is a liability as much as it is an asset,” Zuckerberg told media outlets. “Figuring out the balance is a really important one.”
A Privacy-Focused Vision for Social Networking
My focus for the last couple of years
has been understanding and addressing the biggest challenges facing Facebook.
This means taking positions on important issues concerning the future of the
internet. In this note, I’ll outline our vision and principles around building
a privacy-focused messaging and social networking platform. There’s a lot to do
here, and we’re committed to working openly and consulting with experts across
society as we develop this.
Over the last 15 years, Facebook and Instagram have helped
people connect with friends, communities, and interests in the digital
equivalent of a town square. But people increasingly also want to connect
privately in the digital equivalent of the living room. As I think about the
future of the internet, I believe a privacy-focused communications platform
will become even more important than today’s open platforms. Privacy gives
people the freedom to be themselves and connect more naturally, which is why we
build social networks.
Today we already see that private messaging, ephemeral
stories, and small groups are by far the fastest growing areas of online
communication. There are a number of reasons for this. Many people prefer the
intimacy of communicating one-on-one or with just a few friends. People are
more cautious of having a permanent record of what they’ve shared. And we all
expect to be able to do things like payments privately and securely.
Public social networks will continue to be very important in
people’s lives — for connecting with everyone you know, discovering new
people, ideas and content, and giving people a voice more broadly. People find
these valuable every day, and there are still a lot of useful services to build
on top of them. But now, with all the ways people also want to interact
privately, there’s also an opportunity to build a simpler platform that’s
focused on privacy first.
I understand that many people don’t think Facebook can or
would even want to build this kind of privacy-focused platform — because
frankly we don’t currently have a strong reputation for building privacy
protective services, and we’ve historically focused on tools for more open
sharing. But we’ve repeatedly shown that we can evolve to build the services
that people really want, including in private messaging and stories.
I believe the future of communication will increasingly shift
to private, encrypted services where people can be confident what they say to
each other stays secure and their messages and content won’t stick around
forever. This is the future I hope we will help bring about.
We plan to build this the way we’ve developed WhatsApp: focus
on the most fundamental and private use case — messaging — make it as secure
as possible, and then build more ways for people to interact on top of that,
including calls, video chats, groups, stories, businesses, payments, commerce,
and ultimately a platform for many other kinds of private services.
This privacy-focused platform will be built around several
principles:
Private interactions.
People should have simple, intimate places where they have clear control over who can communicate with them and confidence that no one else can access what they share.
Encryption.
People’s private communications should be secure. End-to-end encryption prevents anyone — including us — from seeing what people share on our services.
Reducing Permanence.
People should be comfortable being themselves, and should not have to worry about what they share coming back to hurt them later. So we won’t keep messages or stories around for longer than necessary to deliver the service or longer than people want them.
Safety.
People should expect that we will do everything we can to keep them safe on our services within the limits of what’s possible in an encrypted service.
Interoperability.
People should be able to use any of our apps to reach their friends, and they should be able to communicate across networks easily and securely.
Secure data storage.
People should expect that we won’t store sensitive data in countries with weak records on human rights like privacy and freedom of expression in order to protect data from being improperly accessed.
Over the next few years, we plan to rebuild more of our
services around these ideas. The decisions we’ll face along the way will mean
taking positions on important issues concerning the future of the internet. We
understand there are a lot of tradeoffs to get right, and we’re committed to
consulting with experts and discussing the best way forward. This will take
some time, but we’re not going to develop this major change in our direction
behind closed doors. We’re going to do this as openly and collaboratively as we
can because many of these issues affect different parts of society.
Private Interactions as a Foundation
For a service to feel private, there must never be any doubt
about who you are communicating with. We’ve worked hard to build privacy into
all our products, including those for public sharing. But one great property of
messaging services is that even as your contacts list grows, your individual
threads and groups remain private. As your friends evolve over time, messaging
services evolve gracefully and remain intimate.
This is different from broader social networks, where people
can accumulate friends or followers until the services feel more public. This
is well-suited to many important uses — telling all your friends about
something, using your voice on important topics, finding communities of people
with similar interests, following creators and media, buying and selling
things, organizing fundraisers, growing businesses, or many other things that
benefit from having everyone you know in one place. Still, when you see all
these experiences together, it feels more like a town square than a more
intimate space like a living room.
There is an opportunity to build a platform that focuses on
all of the ways people want to interact privately. This sense of privacy and
intimacy is not just about technical features — it is designed deeply into the
feel of the service overall. In WhatsApp, for example, our team is obsessed with
creating an intimate environment in every aspect of the product. Even where
we’ve built features that allow for broader sharing, it’s still a less public
experience. When the team built groups, they put in a size limit to make sure
every interaction felt private. When we shipped stories on WhatsApp, we limited
public content because we worried it might erode the feeling of privacy to see
lots of public content — even if it didn’t actually change who you’re sharing
with.
In a few years, I expect future versions of Messenger and
WhatsApp to become the main ways people communicate on the Facebook network.
We’re focused on making both of these apps faster, simpler, more private and
more secure, including with end-to-end encryption. We then plan to add more ways
to interact privately with your friends, groups, and businesses. If this
evolution is successful, interacting with your friends and family across the
Facebook network will become a fundamentally more private experience.
Encryption and Safety
People expect their private communications to be secure and to
only be seen by the people they’ve sent them to — not hackers, criminals,
over-reaching governments, or even the people operating the services they’re
using.
There is a growing awareness that the more entities that have
access to your data, the more vulnerabilities there are for someone to misuse
it or for a cyber attack to expose it. There is also a growing concern among
some that technology may be centralizing power in the hands of governments and
companies like ours. And some people worry that our services could access their
messages and use them for advertising or in other ways they don’t expect.
End-to-end encryption is an important tool in developing a
privacy-focused social network. Encryption is decentralizing — it limits
services like ours from seeing the content flowing through them and makes it
much harder for anyone else to access your information. This is why encryption
is an increasingly important part of our online lives, from banking to healthcare
services. It’s also why we built end-to-end encryption into WhatsApp after we
acquired it.
In the last year, I’ve spoken with dissidents who’ve told me
encryption is the reason they are free, or even alive. Governments often make
unlawful demands for data, and while we push back and fight these requests in
court, there’s always a risk we’ll lose a case — and if the information isn’t
encrypted we’d either have to turn over the data or risk our employees being
arrested if we failed to comply. This may seem extreme, but we’ve had a case
where one of our employees was actually jailed for not providing access to
someone’s private information even though we couldn’t access it since it was
encrypted.
At the same time, there are real safety concerns to address
before we can implement end-to-end encryption across all of our messaging
services. Encryption is a powerful tool for privacy, but that includes the
privacy of people doing bad things. When billions of people use a service to
connect, some of them are going to misuse it for truly terrible things like
child exploitation, terrorism, and extortion. We have a responsibility to work
with law enforcement and to help prevent these wherever we can. We are working
to improve our ability to identify and stop bad actors across our apps by
detecting patterns of activity or through other means, even when we can’t see
the content of the messages, and we will continue to invest in this work. But
we face an inherent tradeoff because we will never find all of the potential
harm we do today when our security systems can see the messages themselves.
Finding the right ways to protect both privacy and safety is
something societies have historically grappled with. There are still many open
questions here and we’ll consult with safety experts, law enforcement and
governments on the best ways to implement safety measures. We’ll also need to
work together with other platforms to make sure that as an industry we get this
right. The more we can create a common approach, the better.
On balance, I believe working towards implementing end-to-end
encryption for all private communications is the right thing to do. Messages
and calls are some of the most sensitive private conversations people have, and
in a world of increasing cyber security threats and heavy-handed government
intervention in many countries, people want us to take the extra step to secure
their most private data. That seems right to me, as long as we take the time to
build the appropriate safety systems that stop bad actors as much as we
possibly can within the limits of an encrypted service. We’ve started working
on these safety systems building on the work we’ve done in WhatsApp, and we’ll
discuss them with experts through 2019 and beyond before fully implementing
end-to-end encryption. As we learn more from those experts, we’ll finalize how
to roll out these systems.
Reducing Permanence
We increasingly believe it’s important to keep information
around for shorter periods of time. People want to know that what they share won’t
come back to hurt them later, and reducing the length of time their information
is stored and accessible will help.
One challenge in building social tools is the “permanence
problem”. As we build up large collections of messages and photos over
time, they can become a liability as well as an asset. For example, many people
who have been on Facebook for a long time have photos from when they were
younger that could be embarrassing. But people also really love keeping a
record of their lives. And if all posts on Facebook and Instagram disappeared,
people would lose access to a lot of valuable knowledge and experiences others
have shared.
I believe there’s an opportunity to set a new standard for
private communication platforms — where content automatically expires or is
archived over time. Stories already expire after 24 hours unless you archive
them, and that gives people the comfort to share more naturally. This
philosophy could be extended to all private content.
For example, messages could be deleted after a month or a year
by default. This would reduce the risk of your messages resurfacing and
embarrassing you later. Of course you’d have the ability to change the
timeframe or turn off auto-deletion for your threads if you wanted. And we
could also provide an option for you to set individual messages to expire after
a few seconds or minutes if you wanted.
It also makes sense to limit the amount of time we store
messaging metadata. We use this data to run our spam and safety systems, but we
don’t always need to keep it around for a long time. An important part of the
solution is to collect less personal data in the first place, which is the way
WhatsApp was built from the outset.
Interoperability
People want to be able to choose which service they use to
communicate with people. However, today if you want to message people on
Facebook you have to use Messenger, on Instagram you have to use Direct, and on
WhatsApp you have to use WhatsApp. We want to give people a choice so they can
reach their friends across these networks from whichever app they prefer.
We plan to start by making it possible for you to send
messages to your contacts using any of our services, and then to extend that
interoperability to SMS too. Of course, this would be opt-in and you will be
able to keep your accounts separate if you’d like.
There are privacy and security advantages to interoperability.
For example, many people use Messenger on Android to send and receive SMS
texts. Those texts can’t be end-to-end encrypted because the SMS protocol is
not encrypted. With the ability to message across our services, however, you’d
be able to send an encrypted message to someone’s phone number in WhatsApp from
Messenger.
This could also improve convenience in many experiences where
people use Facebook or Instagram as their social network and WhatsApp as their
preferred messaging service. For example, lots of people selling items on
Marketplace list their phone number so people can message them about buying it.
That’s not ideal, because you’re giving strangers your phone number. With
interoperability, you’d be able to use WhatsApp to receive messages sent to
your Facebook account without sharing your phone number — and the buyer wouldn’t
have to worry about whether you prefer to be messaged on one network or the
other.
You can imagine many simple experiences like this — a person
discovers a business on Instagram and easily transitions to their preferred
messaging app for secure payments and customer support; another person wants to
catch up with a friend and can send them a message that goes to their preferred
app without having to think about where that person prefers to be reached; or
you simply post a story from your day across both Facebook and Instagram and
can get all the replies from your friends in one place.
You can already send and receive SMS texts through Messenger
on Android today, and we’d like to extend this further in the future, perhaps
including the new telecom RCS standard. However, there are several issues we’ll
need to work through before this will be possible. First, Apple doesn’t allow
apps to interoperate with SMS on their devices, so we’d only be able to do this
on Android. Second, we’d need to make sure interoperability doesn’t compromise
the expectation of encryption that people already have using WhatsApp. Finally,
it would create safety and spam vulnerabilities in an encrypted system to let
people send messages from unknown apps where our safety and security systems
couldn’t see the patterns of activity.
These are significant challenges and there are many questions
here that require further consultation and discussion. But if we can implement
this, we can give people more choice to use their preferred service to securely
reach the people they want.
Secure Data Storage
People want to know their data is stored securely in places
they trust. Looking at the future of the internet and privacy, I believe one of
the most important decisions we’ll make is where we’ll build data centers and
store people’s sensitive data.
There’s an important difference between providing a service in
a country and storing people’s data there. As we build our infrastructure
around the world, we’ve chosen not to build data centers in countries that have
a track record of violating human rights like privacy or freedom of expression.
If we build data centers and store sensitive data in these countries, rather
than just caching non-sensitive data, it could make it easier for those
governments to take people’s information.
Upholding this principle may mean that our services will get
blocked in some countries, or that we won’t be able to enter others anytime
soon. That’s a tradeoff we’re willing to make. We do not believe storing
people’s data in some countries is a secure enough foundation to build such
important internet infrastructure on.
Of course, the best way to protect the most sensitive data is
not to store it at all, which is why WhatsApp doesn’t store any encryption keys
and we plan to do the same with our other services going forward.
But storing data in more countries also establishes a
precedent that emboldens other governments to seek greater access to their
citizen’s data and therefore weakens privacy and security protections for people
around the world. I think it’s important for the future of the internet and
privacy that our industry continues to hold firm against storing people’s data
in places where it won’t be secure.
Next Steps
Over the next year and beyond, there are a lot more details
and tradeoffs to work through related to each of these principles. A lot of
this work is in the early stages, and we are committed to consulting with
experts, advocates, industry partners, and governments — including law
enforcement and regulators — around the world to get these decisions right.
At the same time, working through these principles is only the
first step in building out a privacy-focused social platform. Beyond that,
significant thought needs to go into all of the services we build on top of
that foundation — from how people do payments and financial transactions, to
the role of businesses and advertising, to how we can offer a platform for
other private services.
But these initial questions are critical to get right. If we
do this well, we can create platforms for private sharing that could be even
more important to people than the platforms we’ve already built to help people
share and connect more openly.
Doing this means taking positions on some of the most
important issues facing the future of the internet. As a society, we have an
opportunity to set out where we stand, to decide how we value private
communications, and who gets to decide how long and where data should be
stored.
I believe we should be working towards a world where people
can speak privately and live freely knowing that their information will only be
seen by who they want to see it and won’t all stick around forever. If we can
help move the world in this direction, I will be proud of the difference we’ve
made.
“Net neutrality” is back as an issue for the Democrats and Republicans to go to battle over. Top Democrats in the House and Senate are announcing a new bill to restore the 2015 “net neutrality” rules that Trump-era regulators repealed.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer were among
the senators and congresspeople who announced the Save the Internet Act
Wednesday. It’s being introduced in both the House and the Senate and aims to
codify the previous protections in law. Schumer called it a “real
bipartisan effort,” and hearings on the legislation are set to begin next
week.
Here’s the Save The Internet Act of 2019 that nearly every Senate Democrat joined me in introducing today. 3 pages that will restore #NetNeutrality. Let’s pass it and make the internet free and open again. #SaveTheNetpic.twitter.com/BCYtcmcMe3
The 2015 Federal
Communications Commission regulation barred internet service providers like
Verizon, AT&T and Comcast from playing favorites with websites and apps. A
Republican-controlled FCC overturned the rules in 2017. Tech companies and
nearly two dozen states then sued the FCC; that case is still ongoing.
Save the Internet
The Save the Internet Act, which seeks to nullify
the FCC’s ruling, has support from a number of senators, though Democrats
face an uphill battle in their attempt to pass it into law. They hold sway over
the House, but they’ll need to push the legislation through the
Republican-controlled Senate and will require President Donald Trump’ to give
it the green light.
If the bill passed the
Democratic-controlled House, it would face a tough challenge in the Senate,
where Republicans have the majority. The White House also supported the repeal
of the net neutrality rules in 2017. Several states have already passed their
own version of net neutrality laws, and some governors have demanded ISPs maintain
the original rules if they hope to get state contracts.
Having such a high profile
bill in play could highlight net
neutrality as an issue as the 2020 campaigns get going.
Are Electric Cars About To Go
Mainstream?
For years,
there have been lots of electric cars proudly rolled out at auto shows but few
on the streets or at dealers. That could be about to change.
The electric cars under
the lights at the Geneva International Motor Show promise to be the leading
edge of more affordable, longer-range vehicles that start to move battery cars
out of their niche — as a product for environmentalists willing to put up with
limited range and wealthy enthusiasts of new technology willing to pay for buzz
and the robust but silent acceleration the cars offer.
Several broad underlying
trends are converging to increase the likelihood that larger numbers of battery
cars will be on the roads in the next several years.
Prices are falling for
batteries, consumers are turning away from diesel engines after Volkswagen’s
emissions scandal, and governments in Europe and China are enforcing tougher
emissions rules.
As more electric cars roll
off assembly lines, the trick will be getting more people to buy them. A key
factor will be price — of the battery to the manufacturer, and consequently of
the car to the customer.
Volvo Car Group’s Polestar
2 and Peugeot’s new electric 208 compact are electric offerings aimed at
bringing battery-powered cars within reach of more people. The Polestar 2
launch version, expected in 2020, starts at $55,500 after the $7,500 U.S. tax
incentive; the Europe price starts at 59,000 euros. A less expensive model is
envisioned after the first year. Polestar says the model is aimed at the same
potential customers as the Model 3 electric compact from California carmaker
Tesla.
Tesla said last week it
will close many of its stores and move to online sales only so it can cut costs
and reach its goal of selling the Model 3 for $35,000. Before the announcement
the lowest price was $42,900.
Polestar CEO Thomas Ingenlath
says the takeoff for e-cars “is something that’s pretty close.”
“You need a decent offer
of a premium electric car that makes it accessible,” he said. “There are a lot
of brands pitching into the region above 80,000 euros ($90,600), so the offer there
is getting broader, but below, in the area between 40,000 and 60,000 euros,
it’s still relatively limited and I think Polestar coming in there will help
accelerate things.”
And then there’s
Volkswagen. The world’s largest car maker, which sold 10.83 million cars last
year across 12 brands including Audi and Porsche, is refitting its plant in
Zwickau, Germany, to produce electric vehicles, the first of eight battery
vehicle plants worldwide. Zwickau is to produce 100,000 ID model vehicles next
year on what the company says will be a carbon-neutral basis, boosting
Volkswagen’s output of electric earlier models to 150,000. Overall, the
division aims to sell a million electric cars a year, or about a fifth of the
Volkswagen brand’s sales, by 2025.
“We want to bring
electrification to a breakthrough,” the Volkswagen brand’s chief operating
officer, Ralf Brandstaetter, told media outlets.
He said the company can do
that through efficient, large-scale production. The ID compact heads into
production in November and should go on sale in spring 2020, with a base model
available for under 30,000 euros ($34,000).
The company is spending 11
billion euros on new technology through 2023, the bulk of that on developing
electric cars.
“This is Volkswagen’s
typical DNA,” Brandstaetter said. “Making cars for millions, not e-mobility for
millionaires.”
According to Mark C.
Newman, managing director and senior analyst at research firm Bernstein,
falling battery prices are bringing the day closer when electric cars become as
cheap as gasoline and diesel models.
The estimate for 2018
battery pack prices is below $130 per kilowatt hour for the most efficient
manufacturers. That is down from $1,000 per kilowatt hour in 2010, and closing
in on the $120 per kwh level that the International Energy Agency estimates
will make a compact battery car cheaper to own and operate than its internal
combustion cousins at Europe’s high gasoline prices.
Bernstein foresees cost
parity by 2022-23 and estimates that global market share of battery and hybrid
cars will rise to between 9.6 percent and 17.7 percent by 2025. Last year it
was 2.1 percent.
Regulation is playing a
key role.
European carmakers will
need a growing share of zero local emission vehicles to meeting European Union
requirements for lower emissions of carbon dioxide by 2021, and even lower
emissions thresholds in 2025 and 2030. If they don’t, they could pay thousands
of euros in fines per vehicle. China is requiring carmakers to increase the
share of alternative energy vehicles through a points system that gives more
credit to low-emission, longer-range electric vehicles.
Things may change more
slowly in the United States, where the administration of U.S. President Donald
Trump is moving to ease higher mileage requirements from the Obama
administration. Still, California is pushing for more battery-powered vehicles
and hybrids, which use both batteries and internal combustion engines. It says
8 percent of new car sales could be electrics, hybrids or other low emission
vehicles by 2025.
An example of how
regulation can promote electrics is Norway, where a raft of incentives has
pushed the market share of plug-in vehicles to 39 percent last year. By
contrast, China was at 4 percent, Germany at 1.8 percent and the U.S. at 2.1
percent.
Gil Tal, director of the
Plug-in Hybrid & Electric Vehicle Research Center at the University of
California-Davis, says “you will see larger numbers three years from now,”
largely driven by subsidies and incentives at the outset.
“There’s a huge gap between
the number of electric cars you see at an auto show and how many cars the
dealer will offer you,” he said. “It’s kind of hard to ask the market for huge
demand when there is no supply.”
“You need to stock the
shelves first.”
AT&T goes full stream ahead with
Time Warner merger
Now
that AT&T’s $81 billion takeover of Time Warner is a done deal, the company is reorganizing its TV and movie businesses
to emphasize streaming rather than cable TV networks.
AT&T is
bringing in a new executive as longtime HBO and Turner chiefs leave. It’s also
consolidating operations for different brands to help generate more video for a
new streaming service launching this year. Layoffs are expected in the business
now known as WarnerMedia, although the company tried to assuage fears that
there will be substantial job cuts.
With the
revamp, AT&T is “trying to move the organization to a new business model,”
said Michael Smith, a Carnegie Mellon information technology and marketing
professor.
AT&T on
Monday named former NBC Entertainment chairman Robert Greenblatt as the
chairman of WarnerMedia’s entertainment and streaming businesses. He will run
HBO and Turner cable networks TNT, TBS and truTV. HBO and Turner were
previously run separately. HBO’s longtime chief, Richard Plepler, resigned last week, as did Turner’s president, David Levy.
AT&T
said the reorganization will give it “agility and flexibility” to better
coordinate original programming across its brands and distribute them through
emerging platforms such as streaming.
The company
has been ramping up the streaming services that it sells to customers directly
as it tries to maneuver the shift to internet video and reckon with the
increasing number of people who don’t want to pay for a $100 cable bundle. It
has been losing customers in its DirecTV satellite TV business.
AT&T
launched a streaming service with live TV channels, DirecTV Now, in 2016. The
service has already had its bumps, losing customers
for the first time in the most recent quarter as AT&T ended deep
discounts. AT&T also debuted a cheaper live-TV service, WatchTV, in 2018.
Now, it’s
planning to compete with Netflix and an upcoming Disney streaming service by
launching a separate service built around WarnerMedia shows and movies,
including what’s on HBO. HBO Now will continue to exist as a separate streaming
service.
Breaking
down walls between WarnerMedia’s individual brand empires could result in
layoffs and save the company money. But more importantly, it will help spark
more ideas and thus more video overall for AT&T to distribute and sell ads
against, CFRA Research analyst Keith Snyder said.
“They want a
lot more content coming out of Warner,” he said. “That’s going to help them
launch the streaming service and go up against Disney. They really need to
start generating more content. … This reorganization is aiming at that more
than anything.”
The company
tried to emphasize that the reorganization was more about content strategy and
less about layoffs. “I don’t think there are big massive layoffs coming,” Greenblatt said in an
interview with trade publication Variety. WarnerMedia spokesman
Keith Cocozza said there weren’t any decisions yet on layoffs.
Wells Fargo
analyst Jennifer Fritzsche wrote in a note to investors last week that one
immediate concern is whether the departures by longtime Time Warner leaders
would affect the key staffers that make WarnerMedia’s shows and movies.
AT&T
argued that it needed to buy Time Warner, in one of the biggest media deals on
record, to compete with tech giants such as Google and Facebook that grab the
bulk of internet ad dollars in the U.S. today. AT&T wants to build a
digital advertising business, with ads tailored to customers, on the back of
that video. More video means more potential ad dollars and, perhaps, more
subscribers.
The Turner
TV business had been operating as a standalone entity under an agreement with
the government until AT&T won again in court last week. Now
AT&T can change Turner’s staffing levels — there are often layoffs after
big mergers — and be involved in its deals with cable companies.
AT&T
also said Monday that CNN leader Jeff Zucker is adding sports to his duties and
will become chairman of WarnerMedia News & Sports. Kevin Tsujihara will
remain the head of the Warner Bros. studio but take on leadership of a new
business to bring together the company’s family, kids and animation efforts.
