Britney Spears news

• A “final girl” who gets to get off: “The Witch” proves nothing’s scarier than an unapologetically liberated young woman

  06-03-2016 23:30 via salon.com
  
  Note: The following contains many spoilers for "The Witch," including a description of the film's ending.“Wouldst thou like to live deliciously? Wouldst thou like to see the world?”Posed by any other than the Prince of Darkness, these questions would seem to answer themselves, especially when intoned into the ears of an emboldened young woman. Toward the end of “The Witch,” Robert Eggers' lyric flirtation with horror, the welcome response is a wide-eyed “yes,”
  
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• Employers are using credit checks against otherwise qualified workers. Here’s what we can do about it.

  06-03-2016 21:30 via salon.com
  
  Over the last decade, an increasing number of cities and states passed laws limiting the use of credit checks in hiring, promotion, and firing. These laws have been motivated by the reality that personal credit history is not relevant to employment and that employment credit checks prevent otherwise qualified workers with flawed credit from finding jobs, and that unemployed workers and historically disadvantaged groups, including people of color, are disproportionately harmed by credit checks. O
  
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• Hillary’s “House of Cards”: What Claire and Frank Underwood tell us about marriage, gender and the White House

  06-03-2016 20:00 via salon.com
  
  We’ve no lack of power couples to examine in the English-speaking world today. Prince William and the princess formerly called Kate Middleton; Kim Kardashian and Kanye West; Beyoncé and Jay Z; President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle. Marriages that are political, professional and personal, uniting two people in ambition, sex and maybe some other stuff, too. But the 2016 election has brought one of the most controversial and fraught power couples in American history back to li
  
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• These are the 20 hardest working cities in America

  06-03-2016 19:00 via salon.com
  
  Americans work a lot. Despite a certain failed GOP presidential contender’s suggestion that we should be putting in more hours at the office, the numbers show we’re already logging plenty. A CNN Money roundup of stats on work habits shows Americans work more than people in other rich countries; that the average working week is actually 47 hours, not 40; and that nearly 40 percent of workers rack up more than 50 working hours each week. Yet our culturally ingrained notions allow for
  
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• Former first lady Nancy Reagan dies at 94

  06-03-2016 18:14 via salon.com
  
  Former first lady Nancy Reagan has died at 94 in Bel-Air, California.Assistant Allison Borio says Mrs. Reagan died Sunday at her home of congestive heart failure.Her marriage to Ronald Reagan lasted 52 years until his death in 2004.A former actress, she was Reagan's closest adviser and fierce protector on his journey from actor to governor of California to president of the United States.She rushed to his side after he was shot in 1981 by a would-be assassin, and later endured his nearly decade-l
  
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• Democrats have their history wrong — and are about to make a grievous mistake

  06-03-2016 18:00 via salon.com
  
  This election cycle, Democratic Party leaders are pleading with younger voters to heed the lessons of history. Echoing George Santayana’s famous warning: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” they urge millennials to take a close look at what happened to Democrats in 1972. That was the year, they explain, that the Democratic Party made a monumental blunder at its national convention by empowering young people, women and minorities at the expense of pa
  
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• It’s not enough to disavow the Klan: Racists and Republicans have years of experience disavowing Klan, but supporting racist politics

  06-03-2016 17:59 via salon.com
  
  If Donald Trump is telling the truth, he only recently learned that David Duke, former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, is an avowed segregationist. Apparently, the KKK and its history have faded from many white Americans’ memory. Jeffrey Lord argued on national television this week that the Klan is an invention of “the left.” As native sons of the South, we could forgive these men their ignorance. (“Bless their hearts. They ain’t from around here,” is the po
  
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• Trump’s one-click political ideology: His message is appealing in its simplicity, but there’s nothing behind it

  06-03-2016 16:30 via salon.com
  
  The amount of hand-wringing over Donald Trump’s candidacy has become a national epidemic. While many of us want to believe the Donald is an aberration who doesn’t represent true Americans, his enduring popularity suggests otherwise. On the one hand his brand of narcissistic populism has been a feature of American politics since the days of Huey Long or Father Coughlin and relies on a message that alternately flatters and frightens his audience. And like all demagogues before him, he
  
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• I lived the Scandinavian dream: My wife and I moved to Norway for a year — where pregnancy is not a “pre-existing condition”

  06-03-2016 16:00 via salon.com
  
  Bernie Sanders unashamedly looks to Scandinavia for a model for healthcare, education and, well, taxes. My wife and I packed up and moved to Norway for a year to experience this supposed Nordic paradise, even if some back home thought I would become “a mush-headed socialist.” I had received a Fulbright fellowship to study in Trondheim, but the only catch was that my wife, Katy, was pregnant.The healthcare insurance for Fulbright is administered through the State Department, the same
  
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• Language is failing us: What does teaching sign language to a chimpanzee have to do with our troubled conversation about race?

  06-03-2016 15:00 via salon.com
  
  Sometimes, when my mother was very tired, her words would fail her and she would sign to me and my sisters instead. Usually she only ever got as far as signing “stop”—open palm, one hand coming down on the other, easy enough to translate. “You’re doing it again!” one of us would shriek, and she would catch herself and sigh, exasperated, “Girls.”Like all the women in my family, my mother loves language—gusts of words and coaxings and questions
  
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• “Racists for Trump”: SNL depicts The Donald’s supporters as Nazis and Klan members in amazing political ad spoof

  06-03-2016 14:34 via salon.com
  
  At some point during SNL's mini-hiatus, the show 180'd on Donald Trump -- who, you might not be able to forget, hosted a risk-free, wholly unfunny episode of the show last November — and the result was last night's "Racists for Trump" political ad.The ad is premised on a prototypical tagline: "The media's been saying some pretty negative things about Donald Trump. But what are real Americans saying?"We see pre-dusk shots of bucolic middle-American farmland and middle-class subdiv
  
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• “We do not say racist and sexist things; we imply them subtly over decades”: SNL eviscerates GOP candidates in amazing cold open

  06-03-2016 14:05 via salon.com
  
  To accommodate everything that went on in the 2016 campaign just this past week, "Saturday Night Live" had to break format and jam four cold opens into the top of the show last night. Beck Bennett as Jake Tapper hosted the week-in-review montage, which began with Darrell Hammond's Donald Trump — complete with a woefully introspective Chris Christie, played by Bobby Moynihan, staring in the background."I really am running the best campaign, aren't I? The media's saying they haven't see
  
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• Colleges and universities, listen up: Your last, best argument against divestment from fossil fuels is on shaky ground

  06-03-2016 14:00 via salon.com
  
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• The FBI has a new plan to spy on high school kids across the country

  06-03-2016 13:00 via salon.com
  
  Under new guidelines, the FBI is instructing high schools across the country to report students who criticize government policies and “western corruption” as potential future terrorists, warning that “anarchist extremists” are in the same category as ISIS and young people who are poor, immigrants or travel to “suspicious” countries are more likely to commit horrific violence.Based on the widely unpopular British “anti-terror” mass surveillance pro
  
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• This is how the GOP imploded: The real story behind the conservative crack-up, and the creation of Donald Trump

  06-03-2016 12:00 via salon.com
  
  Today’s civil war in the GOP has observers scrambling to make sense of the struggle among the current Republican presidential candidates. Pundits are trying to find the roots of the chaos in President Obama’s 2008 election or in the rise of the Tea Party in 2010. But the current fights are only the fallout from a split that started in the 1930s, cracked open in the 1960s, and was complete in the 1990s.We cannot understand the present without understanding that earlier rift.The Republ
  
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• Vote for Hillary, be a sucker: It’s OK to reject the choice of a tyrannical liberal or a right-wing tyrant

  06-03-2016 11:59 via salon.com
  
  Nothing generates more insipid analysis than a U.S. presidential election.  It’s a wonderful opportunity for two-party functionaries to distill American mythologies into the high-minded diction of corporate wonkery.  I suppose it isn’t helpful to complain about election analysis by adding to the babble, but it does seem worthwhile to highlight the limitations of the genre.I dislike voting as a model of political engagement, especially in a corrupt and constrained system tha
  
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• Why not Kasich! Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and my week on the trail with the GOP

  06-03-2016 11:58 via salon.com
  
  They’re assholes, really, New Hampshire primary voters. At Gilchrist Metal Fabricating’s grimy factory in Hudson the day before the primary, during what the Granite State for some reason calls a “town hall meeting,” Chris Christie tells an illustrative story. One of these indigenous Granite State prima donnas buttonholed him, he says, to answer questions on his position on every issue from A to Z. After something like a half hour, convinced he’s found a satisfied cu
  
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• Cruz, Trump win two states each on Super Saturday; Sanders triumphs in Nebraska and Kansas to stay alive against Clinton

  06-03-2016 05:01 via salon.com
  
  In a split decision, Ted Cruz and Donald Trump each captured two victories in Saturday's four-state round of voting, fresh evidence that there's no quick end in sight to the fractious GOP race for president. On the Democratic side, Bernie Sanders notched wins in Nebraska and Kansas, while front-runner Hillary Clinton snagged Louisiana, another divided verdict from the American people.Cruz claimed Kansas and Maine, and declared it "a manifestation of a real shift in momentum." Trump, still the fr
  
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• Why Bernie Sanders will, should and must stay in the race

  06-03-2016 02:59 via salon.com
  
  Surprisingly, this week's prize for "Stupidest Political Comment in the Presidential Race" doesn't go to Donnie Trump or Ted Cruz. Rather, the honor goes to the clueless cognoscenti of conventional political wisdom. These pundits and professional campaign operatives have made a unilateral decision that Bernie Sanders must now quit the race for the Democratic nomination. Why? Because, they say: "He Can't Win."
  Actually, he already has. Sanders' vivid populist vision, unabashed idealism, and
  
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• We’re not meant to do this alone: American individualism is destroying our families

  06-03-2016 01:30 via salon.com
  
  Like many Americans, I'm raising my children far from family. My father is only an hour away, but the rest of us are spread wide across America: my mother in Texas; my sister in Oklahoma; my brother in New York City; my in-laws in Buffalo. Babysitters and after-school programs and summer camps are the village that helps me get the business of life done, and while having more family around would certainly help with the grind, what I miss most is simply time spent with them. The spontaneity of cof
  
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• The devil’s bargain: Washington is full of people who have prospered thanks to 9/11 — and I was one of them

  06-03-2016 01:30 via salon.com
  
  About this time every year I realize that the Sept. 11 attacks changed my life, and the lives of millions of other Americans.For the better.There. I admitted it. Strange to say the words so baldly, but the truth is the truth.Four years after the attacks, I wrote a novel called "The Faithful Spy," about a CIA officer who had infiltrated al-Qaida but couldn’t stop them. It became a best-seller. I’ve now written 10, all focused on espionage and terrorism. They come out each Februar
  
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• Homework is wrecking our kids: The research is clear, let’s ban elementary homework

  06-03-2016 00:00 via salon.com
  
  “There is no evidence that any amount of homework improves the academic performance of elementary students.”This statement, by homework research guru Harris Cooper, of Duke University, is startling to hear, no matter which side of the homework debate you’re on. Can it be true that the hours of lost playtime, power struggles and tears are all for naught? That millions of families go through a nightly ritual that doesn’t help? Homework is such an accepted practice, it&rsquo
  
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