Tag Archive : CULTURE

Last night, amidst the hubbub of the Grammys, Disney released the first TV spot for its upcoming live-action version of Aladdin. Directed by Guy Ritchie, it features Hot Jafar, a sweeping soundtrack, and Will Smith as the iconic Genie (the character voiced by Robin Williams in the animated 1992 film). The trailer itself looked fine; Smith's Genie, however, looked, well, off.

It's hard to place exactly where in the Uncanny Valley this particular image lives, but given Smith's blue hue, it's definitely wading into Smurf territory. But in a way, this reaction definitely falls into the category of Be Careful What You Wish For. When Entertainment Weekly put the movie on its cover, fans responded harshly to the fact that Smith wasn't blue. When the actor posted the trailer on his Instagram, he captioned it with "I told y'all I was gon' be Blue!! … Y'all need to trust me more often!" Yes, folks should always trust Will Smith. Should they trust CGI? Eh, that's a different story.

But hey, maybe this look isn't final. Maybe by the time Disney releases the film on May 24 the blue will be better. Or maybe everyone's collective eyes will adjust? Time will tell. Until then, Twitter will be busy turning images of Smith's Genie into everything from Jack Nicholson's character from The Shining to remixes of the Star Is Born meme from last year. Also currently taking off on Twitter: Comparisons to Tobias Fünke's "I blue myself" bit from Arrested Development and Violet's transformation into a blueberry from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

So let's enjoy the memes—shining, shimmering, splendid.

When Are You The One? returned to MTV this month for a seventh season, it did so with all the predictable tropes of the reality dating subgenre. There was Zak, the Toxic Relationship Addict. Kayla, the Guy-Crazy Romantic. Kwasi, the Muscled Egomaniac. Sam, the Independent Feminist. Tevin, the Too-Suave Pretty Boy. All were reductive archetypes; all were irrestistible.

The primary architecture of the show, too, adheres to a simple, if effective formula: throw a group of beautiful, sex-drunk souls into a house, add endless amounts of liquor, stir, and wait for the drama to spill over. It’s a social experiment disguised as a dating show. And, like the best dating shows, it melds fact and fantasy into something that's more like the real thing than you might expect.

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In 2016, I began obsessively watching the MTV franchise—then in season 4—as a form of self-care. I was in search of easy detachments from the nonstop barrage of daily life, with its personal and professional glitches; mindless reality TV worked like the perfect tranquilizer, helping to momentarily alleviate the disquiet that rattled around me. AYTO was a mirage, and there was solace in its fabrication, in the spectacle and riot it made out of love. If real life had become too defeating, perhaps there was something I could discern from the unreal.

I don’t consider myself a reality TV junkie, but there is a unique magic to the genre’s dating shows I find especially intoxicating. In my 32 years, I’ve failed—spectacularly, foolishly—at fortifying any semblance of true romance. It’s partly why I’m enthralled by this particular breed of show.

The early-aughts run of mid-tier reality dating staples—Blind Date (UPN), Change of Heart (syndicated), Next (MTV), and Paradise Hotel (Fox)—exposed me to the genre’s saccharine chaos. I was a teenager completely, and oddly, enraptured by the romantic failures of grownups. It didn't take long to see through its pretense of realness, though. But such is the nature of TV that hinges on confession and courtship, where authenticity is a matter of perception: we yearn for the big reveal no matter how hollow it turns out to be, no matter how quickly we puncture its illusion. The consumption of these shows became my own secret diet. I devoured them without a thought.

In Captive Audience: On Love and Reality TV, Lucas Mann writes of the genre’s inherent polarity. “In proximity, the two words begin to chip away at each other’s meaning. Reality should not be a performance; a show, if it’s any good, should probably be exaggerating something. The resulting promise of the phrase, then, is an impossibility: transforming facts to the level of the spectacular.” Then and now, I find myself striving for the opposite of this: I hope to whittle the spectacular into fact, to mold the exaggerated into a shield against imminent failures of the heart.

With its choreographed sentimentality and the promise of emotional sabotage, Are You The One? exploits a uniform TV framework but offers a twist. The conceit of the show tests science against free will. MTV picks “22 singles who suck at love”—11 women and 11 men; like most reality dating shows it’s stubbornly heteronormative—and puts them in a house for a given number of weeks (typically no more than two months). Before AYTO contestants can enter the house, however, they must consent to a detailed matchmaking test, whereupon producers secretly pair the most compatible guys and girls. Once in the house, through a series of drunken social encounters and challenges, contestants have to find their “perfect match.” Emotions bubble and froth, arguments are had, and by the finale, with $1 million on the line, the goal is to have all the perfect matches coupled together.

Having to find one’s “perfect match” in such a truncated, high-stakes time frame forces contestants into a continual state of exchange: through conversation, through sex, through fighting. This reciprocity often translates like Twitter or Instagram, with its never-ending circus of communication between users and its manufactured gaze: we enact a performative identity so that others might see us as we wish to be seen.

Kelli Korducki, writing in Real Life about ABC’s Bachelor franchise, pointed to the sticky parallels between reality TV and social media. “Any person with an Instagram account can confirm that it’s pleasing to see people as they desire to be seen, even while knowing that the proffered glimpse is curatorial at the least.” But it doesn’t typically play out like that on a show like AYTO. What I’ve come to love particularly about the various, and very cheesy, reality dating series, above other reality TV subgenres, is how contestants seem less polished; there is a loss of control that, at some point, overtakes the show—one contestants seem to willfully embrace.

And so reality becomes a fantasy for us, and a dark fiction for the contestant. The gulf between the image on screen and our interpretation of it, as Mann points to in his book, expands and contracts, and pleasure—at least, the pleasure I’ve found in such shows—arises from what we choose to hook our hopes, fears, and desires into.

In April, Hulu acquired Love Island, the popular UK reality dating show that just ended its fourth season. As with AYTO, I’ve become consumed by it. Unlike AYTO, though, it’s a show of shameless, indulgent excess: seasons run 34-57 episodes, each is an hour long, and it airs six nights a week over the summer. (I’ve made my way through the first two seasons.)

What transpires on screen has less of a maximalist feel: five guys and five girls live and sleep together in a mansion in Majorca. (Even if couples don’t share a romantic spark, they must still share a bed). They drink, bicker over easily-resolved miscommunications, and occasionally compete in embarrassing challenges. Not a lot happens. Every few days the public votes contestants in and out of the house, and the lone surviving couple wins a lump sum of cash. But Love Island is not without its cracks. The show is a brash representation of its predecessors: all but one or two of the contestants are white and thin, and everyone is aggressively straight. It’s a stark reminder of how archaic the subgenre remains. (Are You the One? is reportedly seeking “sexually fluid” castmembers for its next season, however.)

For the longest, I told myself, there was emotional sustenance to be mined from Are You The One? and Love Island. In front of me was profound advice—on how to open up, or how to better communicate—but only if I watched long and intently, spinning their obvious failures into tangible lessons.

But I don’t know if this is true any more, or if it ever was. Maybe I just wished it was for my own sake. I now realize what mesmerizes me isn’t the wisdom of these shows, but their brazen emptiness. It’s what I’ve come to enjoy the most. They manufacture authenticity not into a utopian form of devotion or unattainable love—there are no perfect relationships on display—but into a messy vision of affection and longing.

The pursuit of love is an imperfect, chaotic endeavor. Scripted stories strive to acknowledge that in their own way, whether syrupy melodramas and meet-cute rom-coms—but it’s the ersatz verité of these gaudy dating shows that fully captures the shaggy unpredictability of passion and partnership. In all their contrived falsity, they manage to be more alive, more true, than anything else on TV.

How We Love: Read More

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Culture

Do You Have a Normal Sex Life?

The average person will kiss 21.5 people in their lifetime. And while guys lose their virginities at 16.8 years old, women will hold out a little longer until 17.2 years old. Find out how you stack up between the sheets as we run through the stats of an average sex life, as told with sex dolls.

Last week started ominously, with the news that Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke was firing the department's inspector general even though he—Zinke—is the subject of multiple investigations, and ended with the news that one of those investigations had found Zinke guilty of violating official policy regarding government travel, costing taxpayers $25,000 in the process. (That inspector, by the way, wasn't fired. It was all, apparently, one big misunderstanding.) But it wasn't just a Zinke week; there were also shouting matches at the White House between the president's chief advisors, Facebook hiring a famously unsuccessful British politician to head up its global affairs unit, President Trump cheering violence against journalists, and Canada legalizing weed and then immediately running out. You guys, it's been a week, and that's not even going anywhere near this:

…Whatever the world is coming to, let's try and piece it together, together. Shall we?

The Truth About What Happened to Jamal Khashoggi

What Happened: As evidence mounted that journalist Jamal Khashoggi had been murdered by Saudi authorities, the President of the United States did his best to pretend that had never happened, assisted by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

What Really Happened: As the week began, the clamor around the disappearance and suspected killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi had reached such volume that it was impossible for even President Trump to ignore it any longer—as much as he seemingly wanted to, preferring to offer vague comments on the subject, accompanied by more concrete statements about wanting to protect arms deals with Saudi Arabia. Was there some way that he could accept the mounting evidence while still leaving himself some wiggle room to get out of actually blaming anyone? As everyone familiar with Trump's 400-pound hacker theory already knows, the answer is, "Yes, but no one would believe it."

It was a ridiculous and patently unbelievable suggestion, as many people pointed out, including some prominent Democrats.

But if "Sure, rogue killers somehow got into an official consulate and killed a dude without anyone noticing and/or stopping them, and it's just coming out now" didn't stretch credibility enough, don't worry; something even more unlikely was about to emerge.

If nothing else, "Yes, we killed him by accident" is certainly a novel defense, especially when you consider that it does contain an admission that they were interrogating him. Not to mention that whole earlier "We didn't do it" thing.

For those wondering how the president dealt with this new development, considering that it also contradicted his previous speculation about what had happened, he did pretty well, considering.

A fact-finding mission! That certainly sounds productive. How it ended up going?

That doesn't look like a particularly hard-hitting meeting, but diplomacy is a game best played with handshakes and smiles, right?

To make matters worse, it emerged that Saudi Arabia delivered $100 million to the US on the day Pompeo arrived. (It was a payment promised back in August, although the timing was certainly an unfortunate coincidence at best.) Still, surely this was a very thorough, potentially explosive, confrontation.

But… still, a lot could be accomplished in 15 minutes, yes? At least we'd know more when he returned and addressed the American people.

Meanwhile, at the Saudi consulate where Khashoggi disappeared…

Would Trump say anything?

Oh, never mind. Throughout the week, more and more grisly details emerged about Khashoggi's murder, including leaked audio of his death. (Something Pompeo reportedly heard on his trip, although that may not be true.) And yet, it took until Thursday for the president to admit that Khashoggi was dead, and even then, he couched it in uncertainty.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post, which published Khashoggi's work, ran his final column the same day. On Friday, Saudi Arabia confirmed Khashoggi's death and claimed it was the result of a physical altercation at the consulate in Istanbul.

The Takeaway: To call this shameful would be an understatement.

Putting Healthcare Back in the Game

What Happened: When voters aren't getting behind your message, what's to stop you from just pretending your unpopular opinions actually belong to your opponents, and vice versa? Apparently little, if you're the president.

What Really Happened: With the possibility of the Republicans losing the House of Representatives in the upcoming midterms, President Trump has been returning more and more recently to the idea that Democrats are trying to dismantle healthcare (they're not, by the way), and that only Republicans can be trusted by those who worry about their health.

As if last week's USA Today editorial debacle didn't deliver enough of a sign that things weren't going to go smoothly for the president on this one, this week saw his attacks hit their zenith with the following tweet.

The tweet came days after Republican Senate Majority Mitch McConnell gave an interview where he talked about his personal, deep disappointment in not cutting "entitlements," giving people the idea that the Republicans would try to repeal Obamacare again given the chance. Considering that healthcare is an issue that voters care about—and tend to side with the Democrats on, enjoying the Affordable Care Act and the coverage of those with pre-existing conditions—it's easy to see why Republicans feel the need to falsify things on the subject.

All of which is to say, people noticed that Trump was essentially saying the very opposite of what was true.

The question, as always, is this: How many people will believe the president despite the evidence of … you know, the rest of the real world? The answer might depend on how many people have found themselves relying on the Affordable Care Act's coverage for pre-existing conditions and have been affected by the Trump Administration's attempts to take it away.

The Takeaway: Hey, TV's David Simon. You're filled with righteous anger, would you like to take a swing at summarizing this one?

'Horseface'?

What Happened: Despite his busy week, President Trump still found the time to take a jab at Stormy Daniels.

What Really Happened: Perhaps we're spending too much time on the ways in which the president deals with political matters. Maybe we should spend a little moment or two on how petty he can be instead. Early last week, a federal judge dismissed a defamation lawsuit against Trump brought by Stormy Daniels. For most people, this would be a relief, and perhaps a sign to rein in the over-the-top rhetoric. Donald J. Trump is not most people, as this tweet from the next morning made particularly clear.

Folks are generally used to this nonsense by now, but really, let's just take a moment to actually think about this.

Of course, the comment prompted all manner of coverage, because, come on. And yet, it's hardly surprising.

Michael Avenatti, who came to—fame? infamy? We're not sure what the correct term should be, really—as Stormy Daniels' lawyer, took to Twitter to release a statement in reply.

And how did Daniels respond?

It would be nice to say that the president learned the error of his ways and apologized afterwards, but instead, he apparently believed he'd done a great job.

The Takeaway: Once again, reality feels like it's significantly outpacing satire, to the point where even The Onion is struggling to keep up.

Elizabeth Warren's DNA

What Happened: Senator Elizabeth Warren released the results of a DNA test. It went impressively poorly.

What Really Happened: As we noted above, the midterms are just a couple of weeks away, so as you can imagine, everyone on both sides of the political aisle is definitely concentrating on the important stuff.

… And yet, here we all are, somehow actually discussing a senator’s DNA test results. Senator Warren, what were you thinking?

Well, surely this had the president and his staff preparing an apology, given how eager they usually are to try to make peace with their political enemies.

Maybe you caught Trump denying that he'd offered $1 million to a charity of Warren's choice if she proved Native American heritage. Looks as though he was lying—or, as some would say in vague defense, being somewhat economical with the truth—as was easily demonstrated on Twitter, for the little good that it did.

But, wait! That was just his first attempt at a response, and it got worse as he kept going.

Well, at least Warren didn't upset anyone else with this seemingly pointless stunt. Oh no, she definitely did.

I think we can chalk this whole thing up to a spectacular own goal on behalf of Warren, despite attempts to redeem the argument at its core. And so, as probably expected (sadly), guess who got the last—and, really, probably only—laugh in this whole sordid affair?

The Takeaway: Oh, wait. We forgot to note that things actually got worse on Thursday, thanks to a tweet from former Chairman of the Oversight Committee and current Fox News contributor Jason Chaffetz.

A Tough Spot

What Happened: A new radio spot for a congressional race in Arkansas upset a lot of people.

What Really Happened: But, hey! The midterms are coming, and not everything is about the president. For example, let's look at this ad for a local race in Arkansas…

Yes, that was a real ad. And, yes, people were noticing it outside the state. On Twitter, the response was… Well, you can probably guess, really.

More than a few people wondered who was behind such an ad, and there was an answer to that which was … well, somewhat unexpected.

That's not to say that this makes the organization he represents legitimate, of course. Or, for that matter, what it even pretended to be.

At least Rep. French Hill did the right thing—even if he didn't do it until after the ad had gone viral and been shared across the internet.

The Takeaway: Regardless of one's reaction to the advertisement, it is compelling, even if it's compelling for all the wrong reasons.

Sabrina Spellman, the protagonist of Netflix’s Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, makes a dramatic departure from her first Archie Comics incarnation. She’s still a half-witch, half-mortal teen, concealing her powers from everyone in the mortal world. But this latest iteration of the teenage witch, played by Kiernan Shipka, confronts problems that feel disconcertingly current. Early in the first episode, a female friend confesses to Sabrina that she’s been sexually assaulted by a group of football players. Indignant, Sabrina marches to the principal’s office to make her friend’s case to Principal Hawthorne (Bronson Pinchot). He’s dismissive, even uninterested. Sabrina insists on calling in the football team for questioning.

“You’re suggesting a witch hunt?” he says.

Sabrina doesn’t miss a beat: “I don’t care for that term.”

But beyond being a now-familiar convention, it’s also a moment of startling awareness for the show: “witch hunt” directly evokes language that has been used to delegitimize the #MeToo movement, to suggest that claims against groups of men are paranoiac, hysterical. And across the first few episodes of Netflix’s new teen thriller, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina negotiates the paradox of gender in witch lore. On one hand, women witches must sign away their freedom to a patriarchal Dark Lord in order to gain power; on the other, their powers allow them to settle scores with oppressors of the mortal world. And in leaning in to that uneasy balance, the show revitalizes a once-frivolous comic-book character—and positions as her adversaries not just the everyday wickedness of the mortal world, but Lucifer himself.

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The fantastically macabre update comes courtesy of Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, who also created The CW’s Riverdale. Just as with that show, Sabrina takes its familiar cast of characters—Sabrina, her witch aunts, her feline familiar—and sets them in a darker, more mature milieu. Fans of Riverdale’s horny teen ensemble won’t find quite the same level of raging hormones in Sabrina. They will, though, see a lot more gore in this adaptation, which is unflinching in its inspiration from horror tropes and images. In one early scene, a pair of levitating scissors spears its victim’s neck, releasing jets of blood that pools decadently across the frame. And that’s just in the pilot episode.

The backdrop of the show is Greendale, whose quaint mid-century Americana instantly recalls the aesthetic of neighboring town Riverdale. We learn that Greendale had its own gruesome witch trials, hundreds of years ago, and the coven has lived on secretly ever since. Their latest initiate would be Sabrina Spellman—that is, if she makes up her mind. Sabrina was born from a warlock father and a mortal mother, both long deceased. On her sixteenth birthday, per Spellman tradition, she can choose to strike a deal with the devil and keep her powers, with a catch: she must cut ties with her mortal life, including her human friends and her smitten, oblivious boyfriend, Harvey Kinkle (Ross Lynch).

Sabrina doesn’t have much time to mull over her options. Her witch Aunts Zelda (Miranda Otto) and Hilda (Lucy Davis) are already preparing Sabrina for her Dark Baptism, scheduled for Sabrina’s sixteenth birthday, which is also on Halloween, which just so happens to fall beneath a vaguely portentous eclipse. If she chooses to sign away her freedom to the devil, in exchange for power, she must also attend the Academy of Unseen Arts, never to see her human friends again.

Unlike with previous adaptations of the Archie Comics character, though, magic is no laughing matter. The Netflix show’s representation of magic is more closely aligned to the medieval and Renaissance concept of witches, who were believed to have been bestowed with power by Satan himself. Lucifer makes a few appearances in the show, in the form of a grotesque goat monster, echoing medieval renderings and the devil of Goya’s haunting Witches’ Sabbath. Even Salem, Sabrina’s feline familiar, is no smart-aleck animatronic, but a cat that occasionally evinces hints of his fearsome demonic form. The show’s darker depictions of magic makes for some deliciously spine-chilling scares.

But they’re also where Sabrina begins to lose its magic touch: The show at times seems so besotted with explaining the rules of the witch law that it belabors its own worldbuilding across the first few episodes. In a pilot episode of a show with fantastical elements, top-heavy exposition can be forgiven. But toward the end of the third episode, when a high priest of Satan’s Church of Night (a leering Richard Coyle) expounds on witch law during a trial for Sabrina’s soul, the show begins to feel didactic.

However, the show remains intact, held together by its center of gravity, the eponymous enchantress herself. Shipka plays an earnest, willful, occasionally vengeful Sabrina. She’s a Sabrina who speaks up, often ill-advisedly, against the draconic laws of both mortal and human worlds. Sabrina’s choices—whether she keeps her powers, or what she chooses to do with them—seem to grapple with this paradox as she grows across the season. It’s Shipka’s forceful performance that allows Sabrina to convincingly insert itself into current conversations on sexual assault and consent.

The show's very premise, in fact, centers on women’s relationship to power: what they can do when they have it, and how the men around them react. When Sabrina is rebuffed by Principal Hawthorne, she decides to teach the football players a lesson herself—and does, with the help of the Weird Sisters, a supernatural goth girl gang who relish in the boys’ torture a little too ardently. Coming down from her revenge high, Sabrina expresses misgivings about signing her name away to the devil in order to retain her powers. She confesses to the Weird Sisters that she wants to keep both her powers, and her freedom.

“He’ll never give you that, The Dark Lord,” says one of them, Prudence (Tati Gabrielle). “The thought of you, or any of us, having both terrifies him.”

When Sabrina asks why, Prudence smirks: “He’s a man, isn’t he?”

Chilling Adventures of Sabrina is a fun, seasonally apt fantasia of your favorite classic horror tropes. (Satanic spiders pouring in through a window, anyone?) But its greatest strength is Shipka’s Sabrina, defiant even when unsure of herself, and determined to wrest back control from two worlds that try to strip it from her. While the witchcraft is set in 16th-century imaginations, the show portrays the agency and awareness of 21st-century teenagers against a retro-creepy background—with scares that are fun as hell.

Last week, Netflix users raised concerns that the company was targeting African American users by race in the way it promoted films—highlighting black characters who sometimes had only minor roles in a movie.

The debate began after Stacia L. Brown, creator of the podcast Charm City, tweeted a screenshot of the promotion she was shown for Like Father, featuring two black characters, Leonard Ouzts and Blaire Brooks, who had “20 lines between them, tops,” rather than the movie’s famous white stars, Kristen Bell and Kelsey Grammer. Brown, who is black, posted a handful of other examples where Netflix highlighted black actors, presumably to entice her to watch, even though the films’ casts were predominantly white.

In response, Netflix issued a carefully worded statement emphasizing that the company does not track demographic data about its users. “Reports that we look at demographics when personalizing artwork are untrue,” the company said. “We don't ask members for their race, gender, or ethnicity so we cannot use this information to personalize their individual Netflix experience. The only information we use is a member's viewing history.” The company added that the personalized posters are the product of a machine-learning algorithm that it introduced last year.

In other words, Netflix cares about keeping you hooked, rather than your race. Yet the focus on explicit questions about race is something of a dodge, allowing the company to distance itself from an outcome that researchers say was easily predictable. “If you personalize based on viewing history, targeting by race/gender/ethnicity is a natural emergent effect,” Princeton professor Arvind Narayanan tweeted in response to Netflix’s statement. “But a narrowly worded denial allows companies to deflect concerns.”

The company’s effort to optimize every aspect of the service, down to its thumbnail promotional images, was on a collision course with racial and ethnic identity. That’s because a sophisticated data-tracking operation like Netflix knows some viewers are bound to watch content that reflects their own race, gender, or sexuality. So it likely anticipated that artwork based on that viewing history would reflect preferences in race or gender. While users might appreciate suggested categories like “Movies with a strong female lead,” hyper-targeting thumbnails inevitably ran into a problem.

The algorithm may have been testing seemingly innocuous variables, such as whether minor movie characters could entice viewers. But it applied the formula to a repository of content that reflects bias in Hollywood, where people of color are offered fewer and less prominent parts. Highlighting minor black characters in a predominantly white movie such as Like Father left Netflix users like Brown feeling manipulated.

Did Netflix anticipate this outcome? The company’s response to WIRED skirted the question: “We are constantly testing different imagery to better understand what is actually helpful to members in deciding what to watch. The goal of all testing is to learn from our members and continuously improve the experience we are delivering,” a company spokesperson said by email.

Why bother customizing down to the thumbnail? “We have been personalizing imagery on the service for many years,” the spokesperson added. “About a year ago, we began personalizing imagery by member as we saw it helped members cut down on browsing time and more quickly find stories they wanted to watch. In general, all of our service updates and feature[s] are designed around helping members more quickly find a title they would enjoy watching.”

The spokesperson would not elaborate on what aspects of our viewing habits are used for personalized imagery. “We don't go into depth on this topic as much of it is proprietary,” the spokesperson wrote.

Whether Netflix’s profiling was intentional or not, Georgetown law professor Anupam Chander thinks the company owes users more transparency. “It’s so predictable that the algorithm is going to get it wrong," he says. "Black people have so few actual speaking parts, trying to promote a movie to me as a person of color might pull out the side character who is killed in the first 10 minutes.”

Chander adds that Netflix is missing an opportunity to educate its users. “The worry here is manipulation, and the way to avoid being manipulated is to be an educated consumer. The companies need to educate us about how their products and their algorithms work.” Chander considers himself a savvy consumer, but until Tuesday, he didn’t know that the thumbnails Netflix serves him are just as personalized as its movie selection.

Selena Silva, a research assistant at University of California at Davis, who co-authored a recent paper on racially biased outcomes, also sees room for more candor from Netflix. Algorithmic decisionmaking has dangerous consequences for black and Hispanic people when used in areas like criminal justice and predictive policing. In those cases too, technologists behind the algorithms may not explicitly ask about race. There are plenty of proxies, such as high school or zip code that are closely correlated to race.

In those arenas, there is no visibility, whereas “Netflix could easily explain everything that’s happening, if it’s making large populations uncomfortable,” Silva says. “When it’s something as trivial like artwork being shown to advertise a movie, in the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t need to be hidden.”

It's hard to imagine anyone has had a career like Ed Catmull's. He was hired by George Lucas to run Lucasfilm's computer division in 1979; seven years later, after Steve Jobs bought that division from Lucas, he co-founded Pixar with Jobs and then-Disney-ex-pat John Lasseter. There, he helped develop RenderMan, the studio's revolutionary computer animation software, which it still uses today. By 2006—after Pixar changed the film landscape with Toy Story, and after Disney bought his studio for an insane $7.4 billion—he was president of both Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios. If you've recently cried at an animated film, be it Coco or Frozen, you have Catmull to thank.

Late Tuesday night, after 32 years, Ed Catmull announced he would be retiring at the end of this year. This is not sad news, though—it's a chance to give Pixar a new future.

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So far, Disney hasn't named Catmull's replacement. Jim Morris, president of Pixar, and Andrew Millstein, head of Walt Disney Animation Studios, will be running their respective outfits for now. But if Catmull's previous statements on the subject hold true, they've already been primed for the job. Around the release of his book Creativity, Inc. in 2015, he noted that he wanted to create a culture that would endure after he was gone; Disney movies had slumped after Walt Disney's passing because he hadn't put in place the next generation of filmmakers, Catmull said, and Apple had succeeded because Jobs had. If Catmull has decided now is the time to retire, one can only hope he's taken his own advice and made sure everyone on the corporate ladder is a strong rung.

But it goes deeper than that, all the way to the ground beneath that ladder. Disney announced earlier this year that Lasseter would be leaving at the end of 2018 following what he called "missteps" that made his employees feel "disrespected and uncomfortable." (He'd faced accusations of inappropriate conduct in the period leading up to the announcement.) That leaves Pixar in the position of being able to rebuild. During that same interview a few years back, Catmull stressed the importance of Pixar hiring more female directors, noting that the company was running Girls Who Code programs to get young women into the tech side of the company. Should Pixar continue that path, it'll have a bullpen of new innovators ready to be, well, the next Ed Catmull.

It could also be a time for Pixar to look beyond animation entirely. Pixar's rendering software changed how animated films were made, but that was a quarter of a century ago. It's time the company started developing the next filmmaking tool—even if that tool doesn't just make films. Last year, the company dipped its toe into virtual reality with a VR experience centered around its film Coco. If it ever actually put its brain and computing power into VR, there's no telling what it could make. Pixar vet Saschka Unseld demonstrated what could be done with animation in VR with projects like Dear Angelica and Henry (as have many others), and there's no reason Pixar couldn't have a VR division. If Jon Favreau can use the technology to work on his forthcoming Lion King reboot and Lucasfilm can have a whole department (ILMxLab) for immersive storytelling, Pixar should be getting into the game, too.

Speaking of immersive, there's also augmented reality. The format is still so new it's only barely on consumers' radar, but as Pokémon Go proved folks are open to it. Now that Magic Leap is a real company with a real headset, AR's presence in the world is only going to grow. Perhaps not as fast as VR's, but as smartphones get faster and other hardware gets better, AR could soon catch up. ILMxLab and Peter Jackson's Weta Workshop have already been working on content with Magic Leap for months—some of which Jackson hopes can be released next year—Pixar would be smart to join the pack.

The company can, of course, also rebuild itself into something new entirely. No one necessarily knew animation tools needed an upgrade until Pixar designed one in the mid-'80s. If the company brings on the next generation of storytellers and innovators, they'll be able to find out what the company needs to invent next. Then, perhaps, Catmull's greatest contribution to Pixar will be truly realized.

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When goat birth goes well, the tiny, limp baby fires out in a red and yellow slime of blood, burst sacs, and fluids, which its mother will immediately begin lapping up with her tongue. When it doesn’t—maybe the baby is badly positioned or too big, or the mother too exhausted from her labor—the baby can get stuck. That’s what happened to Penny, a cranky Nigerian dwarf goat who happens to belong to a family of YouTubers, while she delivered her second baby this year.

“Reach in and bring both legs forward,” says Lydia, the family’s tween-age daughter, reading from an old-timey birthing book. Her mother, DaNelle, tries to find the baby’s legs with latex-gloved hands, but she can’t. She has to grab whatever’s bulging from Penny’s body and yank while Penny screams, fretting aloud that she might be killing the baby. The little thing lies wet and lifeless on a blanket.

At this point, soft city slicker that I am, I decide to check the comments for signs of tragedy. “I was so impressed with how Lydia kept calm and reassured her mom when the little boy goat came out not breathing,” reads the top comment. “So mature!”

“Thank you!” DaNelle wrote back. “She’s been through so many births with me, I knew I could count on her!”

I unpause the video. The baby goat starts to breathe.

This family, the stars of Weed 'em and Reap, a YouTube channel with more than 225,000 subscribers, lives on a one-acre plot in Phoenix, Arizona. They consider themselves modern farmers: They have a big garden, raise goats for milk and chickens for eggs and meat, but that stuff just barely pays for itself. Their real income, the cash flow that puts clothes on backs and extra pellets in feeders and covers the occasional Starbucks trip, is YouTube AdSense.

Weed 'em and Reap is part of a subgenre of channels that make up YouTube’s homesteading movement. In this context, “homestead” no longer carries its original definition—a government-granted plot of undeveloped land—but is meant to evoke pioneer lifestyle and aesthetic. “I dub what we do modern homesteading,” says Al Lumnah, front man for Lumnah Acres. “We all grew up romanticizing Little House on the Prairie, but I like running water. I like my KitchenAid mixer.”

The movement’s values are broadly back-to-the-land, but it contains members on- and off-grid, vegans and experts in hunting and butchery, Floridians harvesting 100-pound bunches of bananas and Alaskans chiseling ice off their outhouses, people with roaring orange tractors and others who slowly, near-silently mow down entire fields using only a scythe.

“You have hippies and people who open-carry firearms in public places—revolutionaries from both sides of the aisle,” says Julianne, whose channel, Dirtpatcheaven, has covered everything from living in a tiny house to composting to mounted archery. “We’re united by our mistrust in government. The more we can produce ourselves in our own homes, the less control the government or our communities have.” It’s little wonder that, as our anxieties keep spiking and public trust in government is hovering near historic lows, these channels continue to grow and multiply.

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That said, most of these modern homesteaders didn’t set out on this venture to thumb their noses at the nanny state. Nearly all cited the same impetus: their own failing health, or concerns for the health of their family. “Antidepressants didn’t work for me,” Lumnah says. “But what I ate and how I ate had a huge impact, mentally.” So the Lumnahs started growing their own food, and their homestead grew from there. Their garden needed compost, so they got chickens; the chickens weren’t eating all the excess produce the garden produced, so they got pigs to gobble up the rest of their waste stream (and turn it into even more compost). Most others had similar trajectories. Life in the city and 9-to-5 jobs weren’t working, so they drifted further toward agrarian lifestyles as they built confidence.

The skills they gained are rare, and therefore hard-won. “In some ways there is an overwhelming amount of information. If you search ‘rendering lard’ you’ll get tons and tons of hits,” says Caroline Thomas of Homesteading Family. Trouble is, much of that information is bad or incomplete. “Many people teaching these things have never had to live with the consequences. It was a fun side project for them, not a food source for the next 12 months.” Homesteading Family—like most of these channels—began as a way to fill the knowledge gaps the homesteaders themselves had fallen into. (Thomas is a natural teacher. While we chatted, she shared her family’s favorite way to preserve tomatoes: fermenting them for three weeks minimum. Mine are still doing time in the brine, but they look good and accidentally trendy. The line between homesteader and hipster is sometimes a fine one.)

Especially for smaller channels, the audience appeal of homesteading YouTube is primarily the old-time agrarian know-how. “A lot of women, when they start [a homesteading channel], they try a few bikini shots in the thumbnails and a sexy vibe. I certainly did. If thought maybe if my clothes were cuter, or my makeup was darker … but it doesn’t last,” Julianne says. “Most of the homesteading audience is Christian, back to roots, back to grandma. If you don’t know anything, it’s very obvious and people will stop watching.” The homesteading YouTube comments section is the most knowledgeable I’ve ever encountered: If a YouTuber is doing something wrong, there’s always some sheep or peach-tree or rainwater-collection expert there to troubleshoot and offer advice.

Still, homesteading is not an isolated bunker in YouTube’s backwoods, immune to the trends and scandals of the mainstream. Julianne cites master vlogger Casey Neistat as an influence and bemoaned the “adpocalypse” brought on by Pewdiepie and the Paul brothers’ behavior. “Now we’re so politically correct,” she says. “We’re afraid to show butchering. Anything to do with guns is taboo.”

Others have taken different paddling lessons from the mainstream. Weed 'em and Reap, Lumnah Acres, and the Homesteading Family have all transitioned from straightforward how-tos to something more akin to a lifestyle channel. “A lot of our audience is aspiring to this lifestyle in one way or another,” says Josh Thomas, the other half of Homesteading Family. “We’re trying to reach people who are unsure, who have a dream they think they can get to in 10, 15 years, and convince them to start now and where they’re at.” Their audiences include fellow homesteaders and the homestead-curious, but also people who just want to garden casually or ferment some tomatoes or just look at some farm animals. DaNelle has intentionally made her goats into characters rather than extras—if she omits one from a vlog, viewers will ask after them by name, concerned.

Sometimes she worries about what will happen when the heavily edited idyll that’s endeared their human-and-animal family to so many butts up against the realities of farming. “It’s not like we’re eating our goats, but we do make our old hens into broth. Our oldest goats, Penny and Luna, are getting old,” Danelle says. “Most people in the goat world would put them down when they get leg problems. You don’t put them on diabetes medicine. Can the audience handle that?” (Personally, I could not. Luna has more personality than most of my relatives.)

In some ways, intentional farm living seems somewhat at odds with a career on social media. Julianne admits to “thinking of social media as the devil, deep in my little prepper heart.” She also understands that social media is less a lifestyle than a resource—for preserving information, for teaching skills. Having a camera set up in her garden pays her mortgage. “There are two camps at looking at our time in history,” Caroline Thomas says. “Some people look back and think the good-old days were perfect. Other people look at our future and think those are gonna be the good days. We need to find that healthy, balanced place between the two.”

Modern homesteaders seem to be trying to embody that balance. If the rest of the world goes to shit, at least they're prepared.