Britney Spears news

• White isn’t a neutral color: “Doctor Strange,” Tilda Swinton and the “unwinnable” diversity argument

  01-05-2016 23:30 via salon.com
  
  In a recent interview, “Doctor Strange” screenwriter C. Robert Cargill insisted that the casting of the iconic the Ancient One was “absolutely unwinnable.” Asked by the hosts of the Double Toasted podcast about the decision to cast Tilda Swinton as a traditionally Asian character, Cargill declared, “It all comes down onto which way you’re willing to lose,” listing off a litany of concerns. The character himself, as historically depicted, is a “raci
  
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• “Veep”’s exquisite edge: A profane catharsis for the nastiest presidential election in memory

  01-05-2016 21:30 via salon.com
  
  By chance, one of the funniest, harshest shows on TV – HBO’s “Veep,” starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus – recently started its fifth season as one of the funniest, harshest presidential races in history heats up. There are enough parallels: Selina Meyer, the vice president who became president in the last season and is now running for her first full term, is foul-mouthed and ego-driven. Donald Trump is indisputably both of those things. And Ted Cruz recently named Ca
  
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• Why we can’t reform our cops: Race, guns and the failure to police the police

  01-05-2016 20:00 via salon.com
  
  On April 4, 2015, a black man, Walter Scott, was shot dead by North Charleston police officer Michael Slager following a routine traffic stop for a defective brake light. Scott fled on foot, possibly because he was afraid of going to jail for failing to make child support payments. A video taken by a bystander captured the later stages of the foot pursuit and clearly showed Officer Slager discharging eight rounds from his service weapon as Scott was running away from him. Five of the bullets hit
  
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• “Your hair is so white, it tried to punch me at a Trump rally”: 10 best lines from Larry Wilmore’s scathing White House Correspondents’ Dinner monologue

  01-05-2016 19:33 via salon.com
  
  Last night, “The Nightly Show” host Larry Wilmore delivered the traditional roast/monologue at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, also known as Nerd Prom, because I guess Wolf Blitzer and Kerry Washington are “nerds,” just like every supermodel who likes “Star Wars” is, too. President Barack Obama dropped some amazing lines, as was expected — among other things we’ll miss in 2017 is having a president with killer joke timing — befo
  
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• The movement to end mass incarceration is still too weak to win big

  01-05-2016 18:00 via salon.com
  
  Once upon a time (last year), there was purportedly growing bipartisan consensus in Congress that mass incarceration needed to end. The resulting criminal justice reform legislation, however, ran into big trouble thanks to opposition from unreconstructed anti-crime warriors in the mold of Senator Tom Cotton, who says things like “it’s the victims of crime who will bear the costs of this dangerous experiment in criminal leniency.” So in classic Congressional
  
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• Google’s new media apocalypse: How the search giant wants to accelerate the end of the age of websites

  01-05-2016 18:00 via salon.com
  
  On Thursday, the Wall Street Journal reported something that, in hindsight, was completely inevitable: Google is rolling out a feature that allows media companies to publish material directly on its platform.
  From the Journal report:Google is experimenting with a new feature that allows marketers, media companies, politicians and other organizations [to] publish content directly to Google and have it appear instantly in search results.
  The search giant said it began testing the feature in Januar
  
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• Get sick, get sued: Nebraska’s poor have never had it worse

  01-05-2016 17:00 via salon.com
  
  Two years ago, the president of Credit Management Services, a collection agency in Grand Island, Nebraska, presented a struggling local family with the keys to a used 2007 Mercury Grand Marquis. To commemorate the donation, the company held a ceremony that concluded outside its offices, where the couple and their two young girls could try out their new car.
  The family’s story was dire: their eight-year-old daughter’s failing kidney had led to multiple surgeries and a deluge of medica
  
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• Dear God, let this primary season end: What to expect from Tuesday’s (already thoroughly bizarre) Indiana contests

  01-05-2016 16:30 via salon.com
  
  First, the good news: We are very nearly to the end of this exhausting, enervating primary season. Only 10 states have not yet voted, plus (on the Democratic side), the District of Columbia and a couple of territories. And about half of the remaining states all vote on one day, June 7.  Just a few more weeks, and we can all start trying to rebuild relationships with friends and loved ones.
  Now the bad news: Oh God there are still 10 states plus, on the Democratic side, the District of
  
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• Donald Trump is making America hate again: This is why his racist rhetoric is so pernicious

  01-05-2016 15:30 via salon.com
  
  Luis is an upper-middle-class American-born Latino.
  When I interviewed him in 2008, he told me he had spent long hours, and a substantial amount of money, restoring a classic Chevy truck. One day, clad in grease-stained work clothes, Luis decided to take the truck for a test drive around his affluent neighborhood. As he cruised past his neighbors’ large homes, his truck broke down. He got out to tinker with the engine. As he did, the police arrived.
  The officer claimed to be responding to
  
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• Greed, inequality, abortion: The powerful take what they can, leave mothers with nothing

  01-05-2016 14:30 via salon.com
  
  Spontaneous abortion, also known as miscarriage, is an ordinary but important part of normal reproduction—one of several ways that nature promotes healthy babies that grow up to have babies of their own. But among the caribou of northern Alberta and the orcas of the Pacific Northwest, abortion has become alarmingly common.
  Why?
  Caribou Abortion
  In the quest for tar sands oil, humans have altered the nutritional balance of pregnant caribou. Grazers and browsers may think of boreal tree
  
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• Love is the mother of all addictions: Compelling as nicotine and heroin — and just as hard to kick

  01-05-2016 14:00 via salon.com
  
  “I got it bad for you, girl,
  but I don’t need a cure.
  I’ll just stay addicted
  and hope I can endure
  all the good love…”
  —“Hooked on a Feeling”
  Sometimes when I think of love, my mind floats back to a scene from my high school geometry class.
  My young teacher is projecting elegant arcs and angles onto the wall. She writes a series of neatly numbered steps indicating the path to results that ought to seem obvious. Start with this, add this, go here,
  
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• The Obama economy on May Day: “It could have been worse” isn’t nearly enough

  01-05-2016 12:00 via salon.com
  
  It’s the weekend of May Day, a holiday with ancient roots and a modern history that is celebrated around the globe to honor both the international labor movement and the annual rebirth of the natural world. Or rather, a holiday celebrated around the globe in every country but one. You get exactly one guess, and one chance to explain why. Labor Day in the United States, that BBQ-flavored holiday that adds one last day to so many summer vacations, was specifically created (according to some
  
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• Bernie is the hero of 2016: Just because he’s losing the nomination doesn’t mean he’s failed

  01-05-2016 11:59 via salon.com
  
  Since Hillary Clinton’s triumphant Tuesday, in which she won four out of the five state primaries and padded her delegate lead — almost ensuring her the Democratic nomination for president — the Bernie Sanders campaign has noticeably adjusted its tone, hinting, as the New York Times reports, that “the senator is looking past the nominating fight and toward a future role in shaping the [Democratic] party.” O
  
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• We are all just this screwed: Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton and our muddled, perverted democracy

  01-05-2016 11:58 via salon.com
  
  The consensus is not complete, but it will be soon enough. Bernie Sanders is not going to make it, as some of us forecast many months ago (and as a lot of Hillary Clinton supporters, having pitifully diminished aspirations, assumed from the first). The dream now being all but definitively over, we must look to the post-Sanders period in this political season. What did he get done, what mark does he leave and where lie his failures? In all cases, why have things turned out as they have?
  For my mo
  
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• You don’t know if that’s beef: The animals mixed into your meat might shock — and disgust — you

  01-05-2016 01:00 via salon.com
  
  Species substitution is rampant in the seafood industry, but how often do our furry and feathered protein sources get swapped? Was Horsegate the exception or the rule?
  In 1995, researchers from the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services analyzed over 900 meat samples collected from Florida retail markets; 806 were raw samples of meat and 96 were cooked. For their analysis they turned to proteomics (the large-scale study of proteins). One of the methods they used was ELISA (Enzym
  
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• Tiny Desk Domination: How NPR Music took over the tastes of the tastefully plugged-in

  01-05-2016 00:00 via salon.com
  
  One of the biggest knocks against the Telecommunications Act of 1996 was that deregulating the media industry would lead to a wave of consolidation, stifling public discourse as a handful of corporate conglomerates bought up TV and radio stations and newspapers, and snuffed out local voices in the name of synergy. That’s basically what happened.
  Though the Internet has since mitigated many of those effects, the strange combination of old-media consolidation and anarchic proliferation of bl
  
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