Tag Archive : CULTURE

In the end, it wasn't the terrible tweets that ended Kevin Hart's chances for Oscar glory—though they certainly didn't help.

The several-years-old missives, filled with homophobic slurs, began circulating almost as soon as Hart was announced as the host of next year's Academy Awards ceremony. The 39-year-old actor and comedian deleted many of the messages, including a 2011 tweet in which he wrote that, were his son to play with his daughter's dollhouse, Hart would "break it over his head & say n my voice 'stop that's gay.'" But the internet quickly dug up several more crude and cruel statements from his Twitter feed, some of which included terms like "FAT FAG" and jokes about AIDS.

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By Thursday morning, Hart's Oscar-hosting gig was clearly in jeopardy, though it wasn't necessarily gone for good: A sincere apology—coupled with evidence that he'd matured and learned since those older jokes—possibly could have helped him.

But then, just as things were getting bad, Hart did something truly stupid: He decided to go back online.

In an Instagram post from that morning, Hart appeared bratty, defensive, and completely dismissive of the growing pushback (he also seemed kind of drowsy, possibly because he filmed it from a bed). "Our world is becoming beyond crazy," Hart complained, "and I'm not gonna let the craziness frustrate me … if you don't believe people change, grow, evolve as they get older, [then] I don't know what to tell you." In the accompanying caption, he wrote, "If u want to search my history or past and anger yourselves with what u find that is fine with me. I'm almost 40 years old and I'm in love with the man I am becoming."

By the day's end, that man had clearly become very, very annoyed. "I just got a call from the Academy," he said in a follow-up post, "and that call basically said, 'Kevin, apologize for your tweets of old or we're going to have to move on and find another host' … I chose to pass. I passed on the apology." He also appeared to pin the controversy to "internet trolls." It was an outrageous blunder: Faced with claims that his words had hurt others, Hart didn't bother to listen; instead, he simply lashed out.

His boastful resentment made his Oscar gig all the more ick-inducing—and all the more doomed. A few hours later, Hart tweeted that he was stepping down as host, giving his regrets to "the LGBTQ community for my insensitive words from my past."

The tacked-on mea culpa, which was almost assuredly vetted (if not scripted) by a team of handlers, was an obviously insincere change of Hart: Only a few hours earlier, he'd been proudly and patronizingly asserting his righteousness. Now he was suddenly claiming to feel sorry for a controversy he never seemed to understand. In a year of botched celebrity apologies—from Roseanne Barr's doubling down to Lena Dunham's effing up—Hart changing his position from "sorry, not sorry" to "I'll say I'm sorry if it shuts you all up and I can finally take this nap I clearly need" was a new species of speciousness. At least when he was being an asshole, he was being honest to who he was.

It didn't have to be end like this. Hart's tweets were odious and vicious, and were probably going to sink his Oscar chances no matter what. But he was in a rare position to actually do some changing, growing, evolving, in a very public way. He's one of the biggest performers in the world, with nearly 35 million Twitter followers and an audience of 66 million on Instagram. Interacting with his fans—and bringing them along as he gets more and more famous—has been a huge factor in his standup and in his success.

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People listen to Hart. So what if he'd used this an as opportunity to listen to others—specifically, to those who were so hurt by this comments? No one likes the term "teachable moment," because it's flimsy, and overused, and makes whomever's using it sound like a YouTube life coach with a flailing Patreon account. And yet … this could have been a teachable moment, one in which Hart actually engages with his critics, instead of churlishly attacking them from his bed. For someone with Hart's visibility to grapple with the hateful words of his past—ones which still sting today—would be a fairly remarkable sight in 2018. It could have actually shown someone's ability to confront what they'd done in real time. The online-rage cycle we have in place now doesn't work: People yell, a celebrity scrambles to make nice, and the underlying problem is never addressed. No one learns a thing; no issue is ever really resolved.

Hart, though, is someone who constantly boasts of his own self-improvement. In his initial Instagram message on Thursday, he spoke as if he'd evolved since sending those homophobic tweets several years ago, yet the video itself proved he hadn't. "You LIVE and YOU LEARN & YOU GROW & YOU MATURE," he wrote in the caption. The loss of one of the industry's most high-profile gigs represents a chance to do all of those things. Here's hoping he doesn't sleep on it.

Earlier this month, people in Central Park noticed the presence of a majestic Mandarin duck. As quickly as he was there, he was gone. But he’s back. With his bright pink beak, mohawk of blue and gold, and proud chest feathers of royal purple, the mysterious visitor has returned—and quickly captured our collective heart.

Dubbed “glamour duck,” by Twitter and the fashion magazine Elle, the New York Times sent a reporter and photographer to cover his perplexing appearance on a pond in the southern tip of the city’s biggest park. Mandarin ducks aren’t native to New York, and the nearby Central Park Zoo told Gothamist the duck wasn’t one of theirs.

Regardless of his origin, the paper of record found New York City birders in a state of near ecstasy as they caught a glimpse of the babe bird. As one person put it on Twitter, “life goals: the unnamed mandarin duck that mysteriously appeared in central park and has sent every birdwatcher into a fainting spell.”

His existence also seemed to keep Twitter happy for some time, a tough feat on Halloween, when timelines are replete with gaud and glitter. But the duck easily outshined posted pictures of bedazzled beelzebubs and frocked flocks. (Humans dressing as birds surely couldn’t compete, though he did inspire some fun holiday-themed ribbing: “he’s just a mallard in a good halloween costume, okay.”)

The here-then-gone-then-here-again appearance of the #birb (as Twitter loves to lovingly refer to pretty, pretty birdies) plus the internet’s instant oatmeal obsession with him inspired WIRED’s Paris Martineau to propose a different nickname for the fowl: duckboi, a reference to the term that means, roughly, a good looking player interested in only in sex, who’ll lead you on and never commit.

It’s a funny term, sure, but remember, commitment goes both ways. The surge of duck tales quickly gave way to political stories and memes and misinformation and all the general sadness and horror and grief commonly found in our feeds. People tried to bring the duck back. “More duck in the timelines, please!” tweeted Bloomberg Business reporter Rebecca Greenfield.

But, glamour duck’s 15 minutes will expire. They may have already expired by the time this story is published. The realities of life–the very serious election coming up, the trick-or-treating that needs to be completed before sunset, the candy that needs to be hidden from children and eaten by their parents–will all conspire to make us forget little duckboi.

He will be eclipsed by a different animal on the loose, an alligator doing something it shouldn’t or a mountain lion in a place it doesn’t belong. He will become the #mprraccoon, who scaled the building in Minnesota earlier this year. Or the goats that ran around Queens in August until none other than America’s dad, Jon Stewart, rescued them and had them sent to a farm sanctuary up state. He will be the Bronx zoo snake. The escaped zoo flamingo who has lived for years in Texas, spotted now and then doing its thing, all alone. The mountain lion that Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff spotted in San Francisco. He will be the Times Square bees. The llamas on the loose in Arizona. Or, the saddest shared social media animal moment of all: the escaped bull in Brooklyn, who in February of 2017 ran away from the butchers trying to slaughter him, speeding through the streets, capturing the hearts and minds of a city who rooted for him like he was a real-life Ferdinand the Bull, only to be shot by police. Let’s hope the little birb doesn’t meet the same fatal fate, but let’s accept that he will melt into the collective consciousness like all the other out-of-place, out-of-time animals before him.

Because while duckboi captures our heart today, every few months, social media finds a different animal to lionize, so to speak. Why? A theory: because they represent not only our own lost wildness, but seeing them in a place they should not be, usually by escaping a place they should not have been in the first place, gives us some sort of glimpse into what it means to be free. These animals on the loose are the perfect metaphor for our time: doomed questers trying to escape the confines of our age. They just want to be llamas, or cows, or bees, buzzing and bleeting and bellowing. And for a moment, as we watch, we’re free from our desks and duties, we’re out there, with the sun on our face with them, wild and lost but existing, even if it’s for a short moment.

Eventually, though, we will move on. We will forget about glamour duck. And we will wonder if he ever knew how loved he was. Isn’t that just like a duckboi?

Once upon a time, the company with the biggest screens in the world made a big bet on virtual reality. Imax opened seven VR centers in movie theaters around the globe, each of which hosted a rotating selection of games, social experiences, and short narrative pieces. It set up a $50 million fund to develop content for those centers. It partnered with Google to build a next-generation camera that would allow filmmakers to realize their next-generation VR dreams.

Then it all disappeared. The camera project was canceled. That $50 million fund resulted in a single title, a Justice League tie-in that was so not-supersized that it could be purchased and played by home consumers. The VR centers started to close. This past December, Imax let shareholders know that the rest of it—the remaining centers and "certain VR content investments"—would be winding down as well.

That was that, it seemed. VR and movie theaters seemed like a good match in theory, but if a player like Imax bows out, what chance would those crazy kids have?

A pretty good one, as it turns out. Because while Imax was closing its centers, other big theater chains were tiptoeing into the space, using a different playbook. Better VR, fewer locations, and taking it nice and slow.

The newest of those slow-roll experiments opens today at a massive multiplex in suburban San Jose, California. Carved into the cavernous lobby of the Century 20 Oakridge, a sleek wood-and-light mini-lobby sells tickets to the debut experience from VR company Spaces. Terminator Salvation: Fight For the Future is a four-person experience structured like a real-life action movie. It's ridiculous in some very good ways. It's also the second test area opened by Cinemark, the third-biggest theater chain in the US—and the best indicator yet that Imax's mistake wasn't enthusiasm but selectivity.

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Location-based virtual reality (LBVR) has been a ray of light in VR's otherwise dreary economic dawn. But like any consumer entertainment sector, it's a big enough term to encompass a wide continuum of quality. On the cheap end are mall kiosks and "VRcades" that let you wear a decent headset—or sometimes a low-powered mobile one—to experience titles that are commercially available for home headset users.

The other end of the continuum is something so different as to feel like another technology altogether. Companies like The Void, Dreamscape Immersive, and Zero Latency offer customers high-end, bespoke VR experiences that are unlike anything on the market. Backpacks and haptic vests let you roam freely around a large space; trackers on your hands and feet make sure that you can see your own body—and everyone else's bodies as well. Everything you see in VR is mapped to the physical space, so if you reach out your hand to touch a wall or grip a railing you see in VR, you'll really touch it. Even real-world props are tracked, so you can wield tools and weapons or pick up objects. Blowers, misters, and rumble panels bombard you with external stimuli that match up with the virtual world. The result is a tactile wonderland that amplifies your sense of presence and the memories you come away with.

That's what Spaces built with its Terminator experience, and it's what convinced Cinemark CEO Mark Zoradi to partner with the VR company when he demo'd the technology a little more than a year ago. "It was extraordinary from a tech standpoint," he says. "But the social aspect was really innovative. You don’t do this individually—you’re on a team and you’re seeing each other’s faces. It’s very much a shared social experience. We just thought that was spectacular."

When he says "you're seeing each other's faces," he means it. Once customers enter the Spaces mini-lobby, they choose a call sign and get their face scanned. Then, after they receive a mission briefing from actors and get geared up in action-movie style—vest, hand and foot trackers, headset, and what can only be referred to as a big-ass gun—they're ushered into VR as a team of four, each avatar wearing the face of the real-life person. That makes the ensuing 12-minute adventure, in which you band together to restore a satellite and escape a crumbling city, all while running around fending off hordes of Terminators, as goofy and fun as it sounds. Afterward, you can get a video of your adventure, perfectly cut for maximum social sharing (and business-driving).

The result is something that's very different from just paying to play Beat Saber in a VRcade. "The early adopters that went to market—and God bless them for putting themselves out there—were trying to sell VR," says Shiraz Akmal, CEO of Spaces, which also has locations in Irvine, California, and Tokyo. "I want a family to come in, have an amazing time, and VR is part of it, but what they remember is the experience."

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The WIRED Guide to Virtual Reality

Cinemark isn't alone in thinking this way. AMC has committed to establishing Dreamscape Immersive's "pods" in at least four theaters and standalone locations starting later this year. (Dreamscape's first stand-alone location in Los Angeles has been booked solid since it opened in December.) Regal Cinemas seems to be opting for an Imax-lite, see-what-works approach, rolling out non-free-roam movie-related experiences in a handful of theaters.

It's all part of adapting to an entertainment landscape that's not as friendly as it used to be. "Cinemark and other exhibitors are facing a lot of competition—not just from each other and other out-of-home entertainment venues but streaming as well," says Alexis Macklin, an analyst with Greenlight Insights, a market intelligence firm focused on virtual and augmented reality. "Movie theaters are really focused on bringing in premium experiences that you can’t really do at home. VR's the next step for that."

The key here is pace. "We could have said, 'Let’s do 25 of these things because we know we’re right,'" Zoradi says of the company's approach. "We’re not quite that arrogant. We really believe in the technology, we really believe in the experience, but we chose two companies and said let’s do a test lab with each one." The first one of those, in the company's backyard of Plano, Texas, hosted The Void's well-reviewed Star Wars: Secrets of the Empire.

Still, this rarefied tier remains nascent. Based on Greenlight Insights' tracking data, by the end of 2019 "free-roam" VR will exist in fewer than 1,000 places around the world—and only 36 of those places will be movie theaters. (The rest will be theme parks, tourist attractions, dedicated facilities, and other entertainment destinations.)

But while Cinemark is looking at this as a test, Mark Zoradi thinks he knows what the outcome will be. He imagines a future with staggered programming, playing one experience for families on weekday afternoons and another at night for teens and grown-ups. He's gonna make sure you know about it. "We’ve got over a million people walking into the theater every year," he says. "You cannot walk in and not see it."

So don't weep for VR quite yet. The coming attractions are pretty promising.

This week, some of gaming's biggest franchise names are in some questionable places. We've got the trials and tribulations of Star Wars games, the questionable sexual politics of Assassin's Creed, and some weird advertising for Kingdom Hearts. Are you ready? I know I am.

EA Cancels Another Star Wars Game, and It's Starting to Look Like a Pattern

I sense a disturbance in the Force—something has gone wrong with the Star Wars license at Electronic Arts. According to a report from Kotaku, EA has canceled an open-world Star Wars game in progress at EA Vancouver. In fact, you may remember mention of the game last year, when EA shut down Visceral Games, which was also developing a now-canceled Star Wars project; EA Vancouver took over the project.

The game was canceled, reportedly, due to EA wanting to move forward with a smaller project that would come out sooner. But the results of EA's Star Wars licensing is by now concerning, with two middling Battlefront games, one of which nearly singlehandedly started a worldwide controversy over how bad loot boxes are, and at least two known canceled projects. (Respawn Entertainment is currently working on Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order for release later this year.) EA has a deal to be the sole producer of Star Wars console games. One has to wonder if Disney and Lucasfilm are regretting it.

Assassin's Creed Odyssey Makes Heterosexuality Compulsory, Apologies Immediately

One of the big selling points of Odyssey, the latest Assassin's Creed title, is that the protagonist—whether lady Kassandra or dude Alexios—could romance a wide variety of characters without being restricted to one gender. It was lauded, upon release, for actual solid LGBT representation—simply letting players romance whomever they wanted. It's a level of goodwill that Ubisoft seemed intent to squander almost immediately, with new DLC that forces your player to settle down and get down to some good ol' heterosexual procreation. And the achievement for completing this DLC? It's called "Growing Up," which, uh, implies that all that gayness was just a phase? I guess? Gay 'til Assassin Graduation?

Ubisoft apologized roughly a day after the DLC dropped, which is nice—though the apology isn't ideal. "Understanding how attached you feel to your Kassandra and your Alexios is humbling and knowing we let you down is not something we take lightly," said Jonathan Dumont, the game's creative director. That's great, but it misses the point slightly. The anger isn't necessarily over losing control of a character's arc; it's about having a gay-/bi-friendly space made into one that is, well, not. No one appreciates being told they're welcome, only to then be shoved into a closet.

Utada Hikaru Will Sing Kingdom Hearts Songs to You, Because VR Is Still Weird

Kingdom Hearts 3 comes out in just a week and a half or so, and Square Enix's marketing is in full force. Now, in collaboration with Sony, PlayStation VR will offer an intimate concert experience featuring Utada Hikaru, the Japanese pop star who's been writing songs for the games since 2001. According to Variety, the experience will be available starting January 18 (that's today, reader!), and will feature Hikaru singing songs directly to you, the viewer.

Maybe I'm just not as up on VR as some of my colleagues, but this seems really odd as an advertising move. Yes, an intimate concert experience, just me and … some strange woman … in my house. Singing about videogames. I'm confused. They're great songs, though! So there's that.

Recommendation of the Week: Resident Evil 7 on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC

I'm not sure why, but I've been thinking about this game a lot lately. Taking the survival horror series to first-person, this game also took it back to its roots of tense puzzle solving, terrified combat, and a lot of anxiously creeping around corridors. Trapped in a rotting Louisiana manor, it's like a zombie movie was given a rewrite by Faulkner, then had all the deep metaphorical parts replaced by evil ladies with bees shooting out of their chests. It's one of the most unsettling and enthralling games I've played in ages, and I'm itching to go back to it again. If you missed out on it in 2017, you gotta check it out.

[CORRECTION 2:25pm 1/22/19: The original headline for this story mischaracterized the Assassin's Creed: Odyssey DLC as involving "marriage"—but while heterosexual relationship does figure in the expansion, a wedding or mention of marriage does not. The headline has been updated accordingly.]

All week, WIRED's Culture team will be writing endorsement letters for various Emmy nominees in advance of next Monday's awards ceremony. Kicking things off: senior writer and almost definitely not Chechen mobster Jason Parham.

Does comedy, as a TV genre, have some greater purpose, or responsibility, other than to make us laugh? The best comedies on TV this year posed serious questions, but they weren’t, by traditional standards, all that funny: Of the eight nominees vying for Outstanding Comedy Series at next Monday’s Emmy Awards, only three felt like textbook satires.

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Cunning and permeable, the majority of the nominees hinted at the genre’s elastic progression. There’s Donald Glover’s Atlanta, too stubborn a creative outfit to pigeonhole itself into one tidy category. Its second season, the fittingly titled Robbin’ Season, was consumed with theft and the toll of loss, both physically and psychologically. Black-ish also ventured into darker provinces with its exploration of family decay, focusing on parents Dre (Anthony Anderson) and Bo’s (Tracee Ellis Ross) inevitable separation. Even feminist engines like GLOW and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel flirted with distinctly sobering themes: the ache of immigration hardship, divorce and single motherhood, the prick of AIDS.

Then there’s Barry, the HBO series about Barry Berkman, a disaffected Midwest hitman-turned-actor in the throes of an existential crisis. With it, the prestige network proved the static half-hour comedy format could strive for meaning outside itself. That perhaps humor, empathy, and truth could be extracted from life’s more solemn notes—murder, violence, personal defeat. Barry didn’t just mine the tragic for comic; it did so better than any of its contemporaries in a year of standout television.

When we first meet our titular hero, played by former Saturday Night Live Renaissance man Bill Hader, he’s trapped in an emotionally dead-in job as a contract killer and wants out of the murder-for-hire business. Understandably, Barry is at a crossroads. That all changes, though, when he ends up in Los Angeles on an assignment tasked with killing a personal trainer who had an affair with a Chechen mobster’s wife. With a dose of serendipity, the hit leads Barry into an acting class. And it’s here, among an odd bunch of wannabes, where he finds his new purpose: aspiring thespian.

But the show, co-created by Hader and Silicon Valley showrunner Alec Berg, is not uniquely concerned with Barry’s pursuits inside the classroom, or on the stage—it’s curious as to how he’ll juggle his old life, as a hitman, with his new one, as an actor. The irony, of course, is that the one quirk that affords Barry success as an ace killer is also what makes him such a godawful actor: he’s a mostly forgettable schlub that easily fades into any background.

Acting, though, becomes a lifeline for Barry—it presents him with a chance to stall the erasure he’s faced with in his own trivial existence. In one of the show’s more baldly tear-worthy moments, he bares his soul to his acting teacher, going into detail about his military stint in Afghanistan and how he feels devoid of true purpose; the teacher, played with a swindler’s touch by Henry Winkler, confuses it for a monologue. “What’s that from?” he asks, eyebrows arched. “Are you telling me that was an improvisation? The story’s nonsense, but there’s something to work with.”

That, essentially, is the gist and genius of the show, which belongs to a new, more morose and deadly serious stripe of comedy. And it’s not just Barry who’s working against irrelevance—it’s the community of artists he’s surrounded himself with, all of whom are similarly trying to make something, anything, of their lives. Like Barry’s love interest, the emotionally volatile actress Sally Reed (Sarah Goldberg), utterly self-serving and willfully naive about her career. Or Gene M. Cousineau (Winkler), the laughably out-of-touch instructor who’s more Joanne the Scammer than Obi-Wan Kenobi. Even Barry’s boss, Fuches (Stephen Root), refuses to let him renounce his life as a hitman because it would further marginalize his own meaningless life. Set against a macabre landscape dotted with palm trees and weirdos, Barry’s bit players are what fuel the show’s loftier aim, the pursuit of redemption. It’s a show that squarely asks: Can a person actually remake himself?

All the while, bodies pile up. There’s blood. There’s death. There’s awkward encounter after awkward encounter. The series unfurls, sometimes with a stumble and other times in brilliant leaps (as it does in the final two episodes), across the outskirts of Los Angeles—North Hollywood, Studio City, the Valley. In this regard, thematically at least, Barry is very much a show about living on the periphery and trying to find your way back to the center. Any center.

Luckily, comedy itself has done away with its center. The influx of streaming giants have amply allowed comedies—“murder-coms” like Barry and Search Party, mockumentaries like American Vandal, absurdist fare like Kimmy Schmidt—more flexibility with interior approach to narrative. The creative flair of a show like Atlanta is that you don’t quite know what it’s looking for, or where it will land, or where its true north is.

Where Barry excels in this regard is its urgency toward empathy—and how it re-engineers that into a kind of power (the same way Showtimes’s SMILF and Netflix’s Atypical do). It wants us to feel for its heroes and anti-heroes even as they work against our better judgements. It’s a show that allows for destruction and daring, for failure and fickleness, in a single clip, even when—mostly when—there’s no expected punchline.

This week has been so long that it’s almost difficult to remember that it started with the horrific deaths of 11 people in a Pittsburgh synagogue, which prompted reports about the growth of anti-Semitism in the US, as well as the ways in which that anti-Semitism is mainstreamed for political purposes. It's weighty, depressing news, so it's no wonder that, by Wednesday, people were throwing themselves into Halloween, and the annual ritual of celebrities apologizing for costumes. Yet celebrity Halloween costumes seem like a small thing when compared to all the other events of the past week. Shall we step back and ruminate on them together? Yes, let's.

Send in the Troops

What Happened: In the middle of an already fraught week, President Trump decided to order thousands of soldiers to southern US border.

What Really Happened: It was Immigration Week at the White House last week, with President Trump trying to mobilize his base using overwrought rhetoric about the migrant caravan making its way to the US border from Honduras. Very little of what he said was true, but the midterms were a week away and it's not like baseless fear-mongering hurt him last time. But then, we’re in a different era, now. Maybe. Perhaps.

After weeks of talking about a the caravan that was coming to invade the US, President Trump started last week by announcing the deployment of 5,200 troops to the US-Mexico border, even though the caravan of migrants was still around 900 miles away, and unlikely to reach the US, anyway. It was pretty obviously a political stunt—made even more obvious by the mission's official name, "Faithful Patriot." (No, we didn't make that up.)

It's certainly a big deal—

—but is it a useful one? Maybe not.

So, they'll be there to … help law enforcement officials who are already there, but not there to do the thing that the president says they’re there for. I mean, sure, OK. After all, the troops are already arriving there and current estimates say the caravan, if it makes it, will likely arrive the last weekend in November, so it's not like the troops would have anything else to do. And it's only a few thousand troops. Surely there's no problem with that and it's all super cheap and above board, right?

Also, it's possible the troops could've been given something more productive to do.

It would be understandable for someone to look at the response to the deployment and think, Oh, maybe I should reconsider this whole thing. Apparently, that’s exactly what President Trump did, but he took things in a different direction than should have been expected.

Oh, man! That President Trump! He's playing four-dimensional chess again, isn't he?

The Takeaway: Of course, there's also the matter of what happens if and when the migrants arrive at the border.

Checking in on the Fourteenth Amendment

What Happened: President Trump vowed to end birthright citizenship for babies born to non-citizens and unauthorized immigrants.

What Really Happened: Of course, it's possible that sending troops to a border that's not actually under siege might not be enough to stop an invasion into the United States that's not actually happening. Perhaps, the president realized, he needs to mobilize his base on the issue even more and take bolder measures. That's almost certainly how this happened early last week:

You would need a constitutional amendment, actually, but we’ll get to that soon enough. For now, let's get back to Axios, which broke the story.

Is this a big deal? Yes; this would be a very big deal indeed.

Don't worry; it also had a fair amount of false claims.

Distraction or not, it was a massive story that reverberated across the internet. But was he correct that he could do it by executive order, considering it would mean reversing the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution?

That last one apparently got under the skin of the president, judging by this tweet the following day.

Well, this whole thing is turning out well, isn't it?

But, no, let's get back to what else President Trump had to say on Twitter while he was on the topic.

Like a Twitter Beetlejuice, Former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid couldn’t help but respond having been summoned.

Others also pointed out that Reid has previously renounced his earlier comments, even as the Reid/Trump spat became a brief sideshow.

The Takeaway: While the subject lumbers on like a racist zombie, let’s have our own little sideshow here by noting an unexpected moment in the entire discussion: This tweet from the Associated Press, which might be the shape of things to come in political coverage.

In Which the Ghost of Willie Horton Returns When Least Expected

What Happened: In case a show of military strength at the border and a threat to undo a constitutional amendment wasn't enough, there was a third show of anti-immigrant presidential power this week, and this one was caught on tape. Well, it was all on tape, actually.

What Really Happened: In case you were thinking that things hadn't cratered deep enough when it comes to President Trump’s attempt to scaremonger around the subject of immigration, well … Let’s just look at what the president dropped on his Twitter account on Wednesday, shall we?

To call this, as CNN did, a racist video is an understatement; one so racist, it seems that even other Republicans failed to get behind it. And, unsurprisingly, others noticed it too.

Oh, and guess what? The video isn't even accurate.

Others also noted the lie, but facts! Who cares about facts these days? After all, it's not as if the issue of illegal immigration is even a growing trend, as the president claims—

—but that's missing the point. Outrage surrounding the video did dominate the online conversation in the immediate wake of its release, which meant that it was doing its job.

In case you're wondering why Republicans would like to distract from healthcare, it's because that's not going well for them, because it turns out that people want to be covered for pre-existing conditions.

The Takeaway: If you can look beyond the racism and lie about the Democrats letting Luis Brecamontes back into the country, there's one more thing of interest in Trump's video that he'd probably not like you to think about too much.

Kanye West Steps Out of the Fray

What Happened: Kanye West left politics.

What Really Happened: Remember when Kanye West was in the White House and singing President Trump's praises? Man, that seems like it was years and years ago, instead of just three weeks. But however long ago it was, the point is, it's the past; Ye has now ditched politics altogether. Or so he told the world this week.

The response was … Well, sincere probably isn't the right word, considering.

Here's the thing, though; this wasn't West renouncing Trump, as many believed. Instead, it was West falling out with commentator Candice Owens over Blexit, the new brand she's launched to mark "the official Black Exit from the Democrat[ic] Party."

Owens unveiled Blexit shirts at conservative non-profit Turning Point USA's Young Black Leadership Summit last weekend, and announced that they were designed by West. "Blexit is a renaissance and I am blessed to say that this logo, these colors, were created by my dear friend and fellow superhero Kanye West," she said at the time.

Dropping West's name helped get publicity for the cause, but there was just one problem: According to West, she just used his name.

As it turned out, Owens must have known this was coming, because a day prior to West's tweets, she shared this herself in an attempt to save the relationship:

It didn't work, sadly, and as a result, West jumped ship, taking his credibility with him. (Well, such as it was, anyway.) Naturally, some folks are pretty upset.

The Takeaway: Before anyone feels happy with how this all went down, let's stop for a second and remember that what caused the schism wasn't anything ideological at all, but the use of West's name to promote some apparel. There is no high ground here for anyone, let's be real.

The Makers of Game of Thrones Would Really Like Trump to Not Use Their Messaging

What Happened: President Trump evoked Game of Thrones' "winter is coming…" phrase to announce some sanctions. The makers of Game of Thrones, and much of the internet, was none too pleased with that.

What Really Happened: The Trump administration has, since its start, treated Iran with no small level of suspicion, if not outright disdain. After months of complaining about the deal the Obama administration had made with Iran over its nuclear capabilities, Trump withdrew from the deal in May—something seen as risky by most, and a mistake by Obama, Iranian leader Ayatollah Ali Khameni, and, perhaps less obviously, Jimmy Carter.

Last week, news started to leak that Trump was seeking to reimpose sanctions against Iran that were lifted as part of an Obama administration deal, despite concerns that it could cause a world recession and hand a political and strategic victory to Russia. On Friday, the Trump administration announced all sanctions would return November 5. How do you think Trump marked this decision on Twitter?

…Yeah, like anyone really thought the answer was going to be Game of Thrones-inspired fan art.

Twitter's response was … well, what you might expect.

That last tweet proved at least somewhat prescient when, later on Friday, the official Twitter account for HBO, the network that airs Game of Thrones, tweeted the following.

The cable network followed that up with the following statement: "We were not aware of this messaging and would prefer our trademark not be misappropriated for political purposes."

Yes, we are now living in a world where the President of the United States makes policy statements on Twitter using Game of Thrones memes, and then the network that airs the show claps back on that same social media platform. Just think about that for a second.

The Takeaway: We'll let Maisie Williams, who plays young assassin Arya Stark, handle the mic drop on this one.

Early on Friday, WarnerMedia announced it was shuttering FilmStruck, its streaming service that traffics exclusively in classic Hollywood and arthouse movies–everything from On the Town to Seven Samurai to Night of the Living Dead. In a statement, the company noted that the FilmStruck was “largely a niche service,” a fact that was actually part of the two-year-old streamer’s appeal: Drawing titles from the voluminous Warner Bros. catalog and the prestigious Criterion Collection, FilmStruck was one of the only services catering to incurable movie nerds, the kind of enthusiasts who could devour all three previous iterations of A Star is Born in a single weekend. It’s a huge loss, one with grave implications for what the streaming environment might look like in the future.

FilmStruck wasn’t the only casualty of the recent merger between AT&T and Time Warner: Last week, the newly minted monolith closed down the on-again, off-again digital comedy platform Super Deluxe, while the popular Korean-language provider DramaFever was axed just a few days prior. Both were dynamic, creatively vibrant outlets with dedicated fanbases.

But that’s not enough for WarnerMedia chief John Stankey, who’s made it clear his company and its providers can’t merely be huge–they have to be massive enough to accrue “hours of engagement,” he told employees at an internal meeting in July. That way, he noted, “you get more data and information about a customer that then allows you to do things like monetize through alternate models of advertising as well as subscriptions, which I think is very important to play in tomorrow’s world.”

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What’s clearly not important in that new strategy is smaller platforms like Super Deluxe or FilmStruck–outlets that can’t possibly provide enough users (and user data) to make them worth the company’s time. It’s a pragmatic calculation, one that’s to be expected when we willingly appoint technocrats as our cultural gatekeepers. But it also seems short-sighted: If WarnerMedia’s plan is to roll all of its offerings into one giant stand-alone service–as the company is expected to do next year–it’s the niches that will make it stand apart from the countless other streams. One reason for Netflix’s success is that it strives to appeal to everyone–sitcom enthusiasts, true-crime lovers, baking-contest addicts. Its breadth of programming, from high-budget limited series to tiny documentaries, is what makes it feel essential to everybody.

If WarnerMedia had eventually rolled FilmStruck into its bigger service, it would have been an enticing add-on for movie lovers, who are largely underserved by the big streaming services. The film catalogs of Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime are barely curated and erratically arranged: They’re great if you randomly want to watch The Terminator on a Thursday night, but good luck finding too many older or more oddball offerings on those platforms. And with video stores dead, landing a physical copy of, say, The Seventh Seal requires far more legwork than it once did.

Which is what made FilmStruck so special: At a time when non-blockbuster movies are being devalued–both in theaters and at home–it was a smart, accessible portal into movie history. Most streaming services encourage passivity; they want you to sit back and turn over hours to your life to the screen, without having to search too hard. FilmStruck, with its clean interface and manageable line-up, allowed you to dig around. It was the equivalent of a knowledgeable but none-too-pushy video-store clerk, pointing you toward titles like Seven Brides for Seven Brothers or Purple Noon or The American Friend–the kind of classics that are all but buried on other services. And it did so with enthusiasm and lots of background intel (FilmStruck often included commentary tracks, a huge plus for at-home movie scholars).

Thankfully, there are other streaming options for cinephiles; MUBI, Kanopy, and Fandor offer up decades-spanning archives. But the sudden demise of FilmStruck should serve as a dire warning to anyone who believed the streaming era would open up our cultural history: The more we entrust our art to the tech-titans, the quicker it can disappear. FilmStruck closes at the end of November, giving you another month to mainline as many film-essentials as possible. Hopefully, its offerings will end up somewhere else. But even if they do, you may want to pull your old DVDs from the basement and dust them off. In a few years, they may be your best ticket to watching the classics.

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Trailers. Casting announcements. Development snarls. Box-office battles. Now that the entertainment world has a news churn to rival cable news, it's impossible to keep tabs on everything. May we introduce, then, The Monitor, Wired’s new twice-weekly round-up of what you might have missed in the hyper-drive-fast world of popular culture. (Yes, we've used the name before—for both a video series and a podcast—but we just can't stay away. It works on two levels!) In today’s inaugural edition: The Walking Dead says goodbye to Rick (sort of), the Merc tames his Mouth for a holiday cash grab, Bohemian Rhapsody is the savior of the box-office universe, and AMC’s anti-MoviePass plan expands–but at a cost. Come for the terrible puns, stay for the stuff that makes you a more informed fan. Or vice versa.

Grimes is Going Out With Elan

The Walking Dead star Andrew Lincoln may have made his exit from the long-running (and recently ratings-challenged zombie series on Sunday night, but he’ll soon be back: AMC has announced a trio of spin-off films featuring Lincoln’s character, the beleaguered dead-hunter Rick Grimes. The network hasn’t landed on a premiere date for the films, the first of which will reportedly begin production next year, though AMC’s Scott M. Gimple told The Hollywood Reporter they’re part of an effort to keep Dead alive for years to come: “We're going to be doing specials, [and] new series are quite a possibility…we're going to introduce new characters and new situations” (as for more specific plans, right now, we’re all on a Negan-know basis). Meanwhile, in an interview with The New York Times, Lincoln addressed the death of Glenn, the departure of original showrunner Frank Darabont, and the extreme measures he takes on-set before filming begins: “I don’t care what it takes to get to a place. If I’ve got snot coming out of my mouth, that’s the way it’s gonna be.”

Deadpool Cleans Up His Act

Deadpool 2 will return to theaters next month–albeit with a bit less shooting and swearing. A newly edited PG-13 edition of the movie, titled Once Upon a Deadpool, features several new sequences–all reportedly filmed in one day–featuring star Ryan Reynolds alongside special guest Fred Savage, who will spoof his turn in the 1987 hit The Princess Bride. The revamped film's theatrical release will benefit the charity Fuck Cancer, but it will also give Disney–which picked up the Deadpool franchise in its recent acquisition of 20th Century Fox–access to a family-friendly version of Reynolds' hit, one that could potentially play in China, and perhaps be added to Disney's forthcoming streaming service. It's a smart plan, as long as no one Fox it up.

Fat-Bottom-Lined Box Office

The Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody, starring Rami Malek as toothsome frontman Freddie Mercury, earned $50 million in the U.S. in its opening weekend, overcoming some very, very frightening reviews, not to mention a messy production. Disney’s equally hard-to-make The Nutcracker and the Four Realms–which cycled through a pair of directors, or roughly two per realm–opened behind Rhapsody with a disappointing $20 million, and ending any franchise hopes for the studio. And Tiffany Haddish’s fourth(!) movie of 2018, the Tyler Perry-directed romantic comedy Nobody’s Fool, made $14 million, proving yet again her draw as a big-screen comedy star–a Hollywood rarity these days, and one that puts her in a realm of her own.

AMC What They Did There?

The theater chain announced that its monthly Stubs A-List plan–think of it like MoviePass, except without all of the dubious financing or wiggy availability–will soon have more than half a million subscribers. But the company also noted that the service’s price will increase to as much as $23.95 a month in some states. That’s far higher than MoviePass, which at one point was less than seven bucks a month. But it’s a small price to pay for the opportunity to watch a Gerard Butler submarine movie up to twelve times in a row!

In the early ’00s, few web endeavors seemed less bound for long-term glory than CollegeHumor.com. The site launched in 1999 as a video and sight-gag repository “dedicated to grinding your academic efforts to a halt.” Early on, that meant lots of bro-friendly distractions, like photos of students passed out on lawns, naughtily titled JPEGs, and video series like “Husky Dave the Fat Guy”. There was enough low-brow, high-bandwidth material on CollegeHumor–and enough users eager to submit their own homemade juvenilia–that, at one point, the site kept a running list of high schools that had banned it from their classrooms.

But in the decades that followed, CollegeHumor’s users aged out of school–and so did the site, which began focusing less on campus hijinks, and more on office-space goofiness and even politics. Along the way, it built up a healthy YouTube following, with the official CollegeHumor channel alone claiming more than 13 million subscribers. And in recent years, following a relocation from New York City to Los Angeles, the company found success with TV shows like truTV’s Adam Ruins Everything. CollegeHumor became one of the web’s few legacy companies, surviving while numerous other web-comedy companies grind to a halt.

Now the long-running company–which has been majority-owned by media heavyweight IAC since 2006–is matriculating into the unpredictable subscription-service realm. Today CollegeHumor announces DROPOUT, a streaming platform that will serve up a mix of original videos, online comics, and chat stories. Available initially as a mobile-web offering, with an introductory price of $3.99 a month, DROPOUT marks a sort of declaration of independence for the company: Thanks to increased restrictions on YouTube, not to mention the audience-friendly demands of network TV, CollegeHumor was experiencing “a little creative repression,” says Sam Reich, the company’s Head of Video. “Now, we get to do whatever we want.”

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DROPOUT’s initial slate features more than ten shows, including See Plum Rum, a school-election-themed revival of CollegeHumor’s popular Precious Plum series; the nerd-knowledge game show Um, Actually; and the dating series Lonely & Horny, featuring returning CollegeHumor stars Jake Hurwitz and Amir Blumenfeld. Also in the works is next year’s WTF 101, an animated program featuring a bunch of in-detention teens “learning the most fucked-up things about our world,” says Reich. “It's a show we couldn't do on TV, because it's way too R-rated.”

The hope is that the company’s more grown-up material–not to mention its decades-old fanbase–will help CollegeHumor succeed where several other streaming-service efforts have failed. Last year, the NBC-owned comedy site Seeso–which featured material from Saturday Night Live, as well as original shows like HarmonQuest–folded after less than two years. The Verizon-launched free service Go90, which featured a handful of comedy offerings, closed for good this summer–not long after the millennial-aimed upstart Fullscreen announced it was shutting down.

And at a time when Facebook is serving up an endless stream of personalized comedy videos, getting viewers commit to to a stand-alone service is riskier than ever. “If I can get funny videos on the internet for free, how does somebody like CollegeHumor break through?,” asks James McQuivey, principal analyst at Forrester Research. “The blue-humor angle gives them a way to rise above the noise. And I think that could work–at first.”

The bigger challenge for a service like DROPOUT, McQuivey says, is keeping users around after the initial few months of enthusiasm. “You have to produce original content at a high volume,” he says. “If people are only coming back once or twice a month, they won’t pay for it. They have to come back once or twice a day.”

Reich and his colleagues know long-time fans might balk at the idea of handing over a few bucks each month for DROPOUT. Yet they believe it’s a fair trade-off for CollegeHumor’s newfound freedom. Reich says conversations about an on-demand outlet began in late 2016, after a TV series CollegeHumor had been developing with a big network–Reich is prevented from saying which one–went belly-up. “I was in this vulnerable place,” says Reich. “We’d just done what I thought was the best pilot to ever come through our company, and it was summarily rejected.” Eventually, Reich says, “we all stopped and looked at each other and went, ‘How do we take back more ownership?’”

CollegeHumor isn’t halting its TV efforts: In addition to Adam Ruins Everything, the company produces the series Hot Date for Pop. But DROPOUT allows the company to circumvent the restrictions that are an inevitable part of the development process, as executives have to pay heed to advertisers’ wishes. And it gives CollegeHumor an alternative to YouTube. The company still releases an average of 3-4 new videos to YouTube a week. But recently, Reich says, the platform “has become less and less friendly a place to be even a little bit outrageous.”

That’s caused problems for some of CollegeHumor’s videos from the past year, including “Our Weirdest Sex Misconceptions” or “CH Does The Purge”–both of which were flagged by the service as being inappropriate for some viewers. Such restrictions make it harder for CollegeHumor to get those clips in front of viewers. According to Reich, YouTube’s algorithm “sometimes interprets a ‘comedy video about sex as being a ‘sex video.’” CollegeHumor can contest the ruling, but they don’t always wind up winning.

It’s not just YouTube’s recent crackdowns that have been a turn-off. Reich says the platform was never much of a money-maker for CollegeHumor. And for comedy creators, YouTube is hardly the eyeball-jackpot it used to be: Even four years ago, a CollegeHumor hit like “If Google Was a Guy” could go on to earn more than 40 million views–a number that seems impossible for any comedy sketch in 2019. “These days,” says Reich, “if a video gets over a million views, we consider that a hit.”

Ultimately, DROPOUT represents way for CollegeHumor to move toward a less YouTube-tied future-as well as an attempt to recapture the lawlessness of the web’s not-so-distant digital past. “It’s not the frattiness we’re trying to get back,” says Reich, who’s been with the company since 2006. “But ten years ago, the internet used to be a haven for creative experimentation.” To get that back, “we needed to create our own platform, so we aren't dependent on anyone else.” Just the people willing to pay for yet another subscription service.