Britney Spears news

• Erotic and empowered: “Outlander” and “The Girlfriend Experience” are turning women on with their “prestige porn”

  10-04-2016 23:00 via salon.com
  
  You’d be forgiven for thinking Starz is where the soft-core pornography lives. Cinemax is really where it lives, but as with all premium cable television, the selective subscription model comes with the promise of nudity and sex. Starz is often bundled in an even more exclusive tier than HBO and Showtime. Until quite recently, the network focused on theatrical releases to draw viewers, and even now only offers a handful of carefully pruned originals, compared to, for example, Netflix&rsquo
  
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• Clouds won’t slow climate change: NASA survey finds their cooling effects have been overstated

  10-04-2016 22:00 via salon.com
  
  To some, clouds resemble bunnies. To others, they can look like squished flowers. When scientists used NASA data to peer into clouds, what they saw resembled a hazard sign warning of a fast-deteriorating climate ahead.Analysis of the first seven years of data from a NASA cloud-monitoring mission suggests clouds are doing less to slow the warming of the planet than previously thought, and that temperatures may rise faster than expected as greenhouse gas pollution worsens—perhaps 2
  
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• The bizarro “Inherit the Wind”: Understanding evangelical Christianity’s persecution complex through “God’s Not Dead 2”

  10-04-2016 21:30 via salon.com
  
  In a pivotal scene from the famous 1960 film "Inherit the Wind," a biblical scholar, prosecuting a defendant on trial for teaching evolution in a town whose laws forbid it, is called to the stand as an expert witness. Slowly but surely, he begins to unravel on the stand. The defense attorney, Henry Drummond (rendered vividly by Spencer Tracy), pulls apart his literal reading of the Bible. If Joshua had really made the Sun stand still, wouldn't the Earth have been destroyed? Where did Cain's wife
  
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• Bill Clinton has lost his superpower: Why his confrontation with BLM was such a stunning mistake

  10-04-2016 20:00 via salon.com
  
  Bill Clinton has long had the nickname “Big Dog,” which seems appropriate in the wake of his confrontation with a couple of Black Lives Matter protestors in Philadelphia on Thursday. Watching a brief video of the encounter, I had to suppress the urge to yell, “No, Bill Clinton! No! That’s a bad boy! That’s a very bad Bill Clinton!”The BLM activists had shown up to a rally in an African-American neighborhood in Philadelphia to heckle Clinton over the crime bill
  
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• Technology f*cked us all: The anxiety driving Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders is really about machines taking our jobs

  10-04-2016 18:00 via salon.com
  
  Peel away the billionaire braggadocio, set aside the insults and bile, and Donald Trump is running for president on a promise to build a protective wall around America’s white working class. Most famously he is promising to build a physical wall on the Mexican border – which he will somehow persuade the Mexicans to pay for – to protect American workers from immigrants bent on stealing their jobs. But he is also promising to build trade walls by renegotiating free trade agreemen
  
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• Neoliberalism vs. New Deal: Bernie, Hillary and what’s really at stake in this primary

  10-04-2016 17:00 via salon.com
  
  Thirty years of accumulated anger with neoliberalism — which has downsized many Americans’ incomes and hopes — has had a profound effect on the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. The insiders are either out or on the ropes.Though the Republican rebellion has been more clear-cut in its dismissal of insider candidates, it is Bernie Sanders’ Democratic rebellion that is of potentially far greater historic significance.Republican rebellion: Much less significantThe Republican
  
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• Malcolm Gladwell got us wrong: Our research was key to the 10,000-hour rule, but here’s what got oversimplified

  10-04-2016 16:30 via salon.com
  
  In 1993 one of us (Anders Ericsson) published the results of a study on a group of violin students in a music academy in Berlin that found that the most accomplished of those students had put in an average of ten thousand hours of practice by the time they were twenty years old. That paper, written with co-authors Ralf Krampe and Clemens Tesch-Römer, would go on to become a major part of the scientific literature on expert performers, but it was not until 2008, with the publication of Malco
  
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• The unconstitutional outrage of juvenile life sentences: Why Philadelphia will be a case study for this criminal-justice reform

  10-04-2016 15:30 via salon.com
  
  Children convicted of committing murder on Philadelphia’s violent streets long faced the prospect of receiving the harshest sentence short of death: life without parole. Today, the city has more juvenile offenders locked up for life than any other. It has been a grim and predictable cycle: Young black men mourned at premature funerals and their killers packed into state prisons with only the narrowest hope of ever leaving. And then the tough-on-crime pendulum began to swing back.In 2012, t
  
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• America’s original serial killer: Skip Hollandsworth plunges the dark history of the Lone Star state

  10-04-2016 15:00 via salon.com
  
  In the late hours of the night, a savage killer stalked a central Texas town. He preyed on young black servant girls, in the idiom of the day, terrorizing them by throwing rocks through their windows and breaking into their cabins surreptitiously, leaving their clothing and bed sheets askew. Then, dissatisfied with simply striking fear in helpless women, he turned to murder.The year was 1885. The city was Austin. And for the panic-stricken citizens of Skip Hollandsworth’s The Midnight
  
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• Watch Al Sharpton skewer Trump in SNL cameo: The billionaire “has a negative approval rating of -1,048″ on the Black Approval Rating Scale

  10-04-2016 14:55 via salon.com
  
  "Saturday Night Live" went full-meta this week, with cast member Kenan Thompson playing Al Sharpton and, bear with me, the real Al Sharpton playing fake statistical analyst Charles Richards."Please don't take this the wrong way, but I expected you to be a little skinnier," Sharpton-as-Richards told Thompson-as-Sharpton. "I know you worked really hard to lose all that weight. It's a shame to see that you seemed to have gained it back.""Frankly, Charles, I like myself this way," Thompson-as-S
  
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• Forget the boycott: This is how we teach North Carolina and Mississippi a lesson

  10-04-2016 14:30 via salon.com
  
  On March 28, 2016, Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York signed an executive order that banned state-funded travel to North Carolina in response to North Carolina passing a bill that prohibits transgender people from using bathrooms appropriate for their gender identities, and also does not provide state anti-discrimination protection for LGBT citizens. Cuomo stated, “From Stonewall to marriage equality, our state has been a beacon of hope and equality for the LGBT community and we will not s
  
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• “I love being back in the Fat Apple, my home state”: Watch Kate McKinnon hilariously mock Hillary Clinton’s New York cred on SNL

  10-04-2016 14:22 via salon.com
  
  "Saturday Night Live" cast member Kate McKinnon cold-opened this week's show with her top shelf Hillary Clinton impression, poking fun at Clinton's backfired photo-op on the Bronx 4 train Thursday."I love being back in the Fat Apple, my home state," McKinnon-as-Clinton said. "Except for Illinois and Arkansas, but they already voted for me, so we cool, we cool."Noting how cold New York has been this week, she put on her "favorite hat that I've worn so many times of over the years" &mdas
  
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• Hillary is this out of touch: The Democratic frontrunner doesn’t understand economic struggle — and never will

  10-04-2016 13:00 via salon.com
  
  Establishment politicians running for high office live and breathe elaborate focus group-tested lines. In time, they become those lines. But every now and then, extreme political pressures can force a few unscripted words to slip through. And when that happens, we gain a rare glimpse of the candidate's deeper understanding of their world and our world, and the gap between the two.Hillary Clinton suffered such a moment on Tuesday afternoon while speaking at Medgar Evers College in Brook
  
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• We’re speeding toward a climate change catastrophe — and that makes 2016 the most important election in a generation

  10-04-2016 11:59 via salon.com
  
  Before dropping out of the presidential race last month, Marco Rubio repeatedly declared that the 2016 presidential election is “the most important in a generation.” Such language is, of course, not uncommon to hear during election seasons. Politicians have been assuring the public for decades that the “next election” will be more significant than ever before, and that if the opposition party wins, the consequences will be catastrophic. As Rubio once stated in overtly apo
  
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• Andrew Dice Clay wants you to know he’s not a sexist: “I have never judged any girl—wife, girlfriend, fiancée—for what they want to do with me in the bedroom”

  10-04-2016 11:58 via salon.com
  
  Since his 2011 appearances on “Entourage” and his 2013 role as Sally Hawkins’ husband in Woody Allen’s “Blue Jasmine,” 1990s shock comedian Andrew Dice Clay has shown up in unexpected places. He appeared in the opening episode of HBO’s “Vinyl,” and now is the subject of a sort-of-autobiographical series on Showtime called “Dice.” In “Dice,” the foul-mouthed, sideburn-sporting comedian has retreated to Vegas to lick his
  
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• There are microscopic needles in your baby’s formula. Just how worried should you be?

  10-04-2016 07:00 via salon.com
  
  There’s a lot of stuff you’d expect to find in baby formula: proteins, carbs, vitamins, essential minerals. But parents probably wouldn’t anticipate finding extremely small, needle-like particles. Yet this is exactly what a team of scientists here at Arizona State University recently discovered.
  The research, commissioned and published by Friends of the Earth (FoE) – an environmental advocacy group – analyzed six commonly available off-the-shelf baby formulas (liqui
  
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• Gen X and the big self-help lie: In furious middle age, a “Life Reimagined” feels impossibly out of reach

  10-04-2016 01:00 via salon.com
  
  It is 2016, and all reports about the state of things are rosy. Scientists tell us that the midlife crisis doesn’t really exist. The New York Times runs an unusually optimistic article proclaiming that — brace yourself — the economy is chugging along beautifully. By all accounts, we should all be as happy as Snow White swept up in that whirlwind of chirping birds and spring cleaning.But you don’t have to look far to see that people in middle age are, actually, histor
  
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• Thomas Frank: Democrats just aren’t that concerned about income inequality

  10-04-2016 00:59 via salon.com
  
  Thomas Frank, founding editor of The Baffler, and author of What’s the Matter with Kansas and other books, is among the most trenchant voices on the left today. In his new book, Listen, Liberal, Frank sets his sights on the troubles with the modern Democratic Party, which he argues is representing the interests of elites, while forsaking the working-class and poor Americans it once championed.  Here, Frank answers questions from The National’s Jim Swearingen.1. The Guardian
  
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• Valerie Plame has one regret: “I wish I had the maturity and courage to have pushed back more”

  10-04-2016 00:00 via salon.com
  
  Valerie Plame Wilson was a lifelong CIA officer until her cover was spectacularly — and illegally — blown in 2003 by the Bush Administration, ending the viability of her career in intelligence. She is now an anti-nuclear-proliferation activist and espionage novelist, as well as the author of the bestseller "Fair Game," which was turned into a major motion picture.
  Chris Pavone, a longtime New York City book editor, never had a thing to do with the CIA until his wife got a job in
  
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