Tag Archives: hollywood

The Woman Who Created "Transparent" Wants You to "Borrow White Male Privilege"

by SonjaBaynes Posted on November 22, 2015

Mother Jones

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FOR TV WRITER and director Jill Soloway, making good television was never enough. “I used to go on pitch meetings and say, ‘I want to write something that’s never been written before, something that’s going to change the world,'” she said at a recent panel. After attracting attention with zany theater experiments, the Chicago-born writer was plucked to work on shows like HBO’s Six Feet Under and Showtime’s United States of Tara.

But her breakthrough arrived when Amazon bought her series, Transparent. Equal parts comedy and melancholy drama, the show follows the three Pfefferman children, who are stumbling to find their truest selves as their father (played by Jeffrey Tambor) transitions into a woman named Maura. Transparent’s much anticipated second season will premiere in December to a more trans-aware culture, one that has largely embraced Caitlyn Jenner and witnessed the hiring of the White House’s first transgender employee. Soloway, 50, deserves some props for this momentum. In 2015, Transparent took home two Golden Globes and five Emmys, including one for directing. But for Soloway, whose own father, or “moppa,” came out as transgender at the age of 75, “to feel like it’s for a larger cause is the most exciting part of all of this.”

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The Woman Who Created "Transparent" Wants You to "Borrow White Male Privilege"

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Leo DiCaprio is already turning the Volkswagen emissions scandal into a movie

by NatishaConnah Posted on October 13, 2015

Actor Leonardo DiCaprio speaks on stage during the Global Citizen Festival. John Taggart/Reuters

Leo DiCaprio is already turning the Volkswagen emissions scandal into a movie

By on 13 Oct 2015commentsShare

Americans may not be very good at avoiding environmental devastation, but we are phenomenal at profiting from it.

Remember that Volkswagen scandal? The one where every nostalgic flower child’s favorite car company betrayed the world by cheating on emissions tests, dumping hundreds of thousands of secret pollutants into an already toxic atmosphere, and causing millions in healthcare damages? I’m guessing you do, because it literally just happened. And yet, Hollywood is already all over it.

Paramount just acquired the rights to a book about the scandal that has yet to be written, Variety reports. And, of course, our good friend and noted Earth lover Leo DiCaprio is already on board to produce, along with Jennifer Davisson Killoran. No other big names are attached to the film yet, but one can only hope that wood nymph Shailene Woodley shows up as a duped Volkswagen owner ready to let her inner rage monster out, and Werner Herzog flexes his acting muscles as a heartless Volkswagen executive. Throw in a little Rosario Dawson as a badass environmental activist, and you’ve got yourself a blockbuster hit.

Teasing aside, it’s actually pretty cool that Hollywood wants to immortalize this travesty. When Grist spoke with veritable film buff and environmental activist Narayana Angulo earlier this summer, he bemoaned the lack of narrative films about environmental issues. There are plenty of documentaries out there, he said, but not much in the way of feature films.

So good for you, Paramount. Way to recognize that it doesn’t make sense to just make sequels, prequels, and remakes until our eyes fall out and the world ends, while the actual end of the world is providing SO MUCH free material. And hey — most people will eventually just be going to the movies for the hopped up A/C, anyway. Perhaps by that point, they’ll find comfort in watching more attractive people conquer what, in their own lives, have become insurmountable problems.

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Leonardo DiCaprio to Produce Movie on Volkswagen Scandal

, Variety.

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You Think the NSA Is Bad? Meet Former CIA Director Allen Dulles.

by RainaGlasfurd Posted on October 10, 2015

Mother Jones

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“What follows,” David Talbot boasts in the prologue to his new book The Devil’s Chessboard, “is an espionage adventure that is far more action-packed and momentous than any spy tale with which readers are familiar.” Talbot, the founder of Salon.com and author of the Kennedy clan study Brothers, doesn’t deal in subtlety in his biography of Allen Dulles, the CIA director under presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy, the younger brother of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, and the architect of a secretive national security apparatus that functioned as essentially an autonomous branch of government. Talbot offers a portrait of a black-and-white Cold War-era world full of spy games and nuclear brinkmanship, in which everyone is either a good guy or a bad guy. Dulles—who deceived American elected leaders and overthrew foreign ones, who backed ex-Nazis and thwarted left-leaning democrats—falls firmly in the latter camp.

Mother Jones chatted with Talbot about the reporting that went into his 704-page doorstop, the controversy he invited with his discussion of Kennedy-assassination conspiracy theories, and the parallels he sees in today’s government intelligence overreach.

Mother Jones: You seem to have a thing for brothers—particularly for younger brothers in the shadow of their more prominent older brothers. As it happens, you yourself have a successful older brother—former child actor and Emmy Award-winning broadcast journalist Stephen Talbot. Do you see yourself in Allen Dulles or in Bobby Kennedy?

David Talbot: No one has pointed that particular analogy out before. But definitely it’s there. I had a very close relationship and still do with my older brother. We both went into progressive media work, and live in the same city still, San Francisco, and have worked together off and on over the years. So I guess I have a feel for what that chemistry is like between brothers.

MJ: Given that Allen Dulles isn’t exactly a household name these days, did you feel the need to inject your book with extra drama?

DT: No, because I actually do think the history is so epic that it actually kind of writes itself. Dulles is not a household name anymore. He was at the time, though, particularly as part of this two-brother team. He was on the cover of all the magazines. For a spy, he was kind of a glory hog.

But what I was really trying to do was a biography on the American power elite from World War II up to the 60s. That was the key period when the national security state was constructed in this country, and where it begins to overshadow American democracy. It’s almost like Game of Thrones to me, where you have the dynastic struggles between these power groups within the American system for control of the country and the world.

MJ: Is that why you chose not to include much about Dulles’ childhood or his internal strife or the other types of things that tend to dominate biographies?

DT: I focused on those elements that I thought were important to understanding him. I thought other books covered that ground fairly well before me. But what they left out was the interesting nuances and shadow aspects of Dulles’s biography. I think that you can make a case, although I didn’t explicitly say this in the book, for Allen Dulles being a psychopath.

They’ve done studies of people in power, and they all have to be, to some extent, on the spectrum. You have to be unfeeling to a certain extent to send people to their death in war and take the kind of actions that men and women in power routinely have to take. But with Dulles, I think he went to the next step. His own wife and mistress called him “the Shark.” His favorite word was whether you were “useful” to him or not. And this went for people he was sleeping with or people he was manipulating in espionage or so on. He was the kind of man that could cold-bloodedly, again and again, send people to their death, including people he was familiar with and supposedly fond of.

There’s a thread there between people like Dulles up through Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld—who was sitting at Dulles’s knee at one point. I was fascinated to find that correspondence between a young Congressman Rumsfeld and Allen Dulles, who he was looking to for wisdom and guidance as a young politician.

MJ: I’m interested to hear you mention Rumsfeld. Do you think the Bush years compared in ruthlessness or secrecy to what was going on under Dulles?

DT: Definitely. That same kind of dynamic was revived or in some ways expanded after 9/11 by the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld administration. Those guys very much were in keeping with the sort of Dulles ethic, that of complete ruthlessness. It’s this feeling of unaccountability, that democratic sanctions and regulations don’t make sense in today’s ruthless world.

MJ: And do you see echoes of the apparatus that Dulles created in some of the debates today over spying on allies and collection of cellphone records?

DT: Absolutely. The surveillance state that Snowden and others have exposed is very much a legacy of the Dulles past. I think Dulles would have been delighted by how technology and other developments have allowed the American security state to go much further than he went. He had to build a team of cutthroats and assassins on the ground to go around eliminating the people he wanted to eliminate, who he felt were in the way of American interests. He called them communists. We call them terrorists today. And of course the most controversial part of my book, I’m sure, will be the end, where I say there was blowback from that. Because that killing machine in some way was brought back home.

MJ: Let’s talk about that. For 500 pages of the book you lay out Dulles’s acquisition and use and abuse of power in and out of the CIA. And then at the end you take a deep dive back into some of the Kennedy assassination conspiracy ideas that you explored in Brothers. It’s not an uncontroversial subject. Did you worry that including that might color the reaction to the rest of the book?

DT: Yeah, you always worry, because unfortunately this climate has been created over the years that discourages and intimidates scholars and journalists and investigators from looking into these dark corners in American life that should be examined. Poll after poll for the last 50 years has shown that most American people don’t accept the official version. The only people who do are the media establishment and the political establishment, at least in public.

To me it’s one of the greatest examples of media incompetence and negligence in American history. I even confronted Ben Bradlee about this, who was probably JFK’s closest friend in the Washington press corps and wrote a book all about JFK and their close friendship. “Why didn’t you, with your investigative resources, try to get to the bottom of it?” You should read what he says in Brothers, but basically it came down to, “Well, I thought it would ruin my career.”

I think I have studied this about as much as anyone in my generation at this point, and my final conclusion after 50 years was we have to go there, we have to look at the fact that there’s a wealth of circumstantial evidence that says not only was there, at the highest level, CIA involvement. Probably in the assassination cover-up. But beyond the CIA, because the CIA wouldn’t have acted on its own.

During the Kennedy period, there was a sense that he’d broken from the Cold War hegemony and that he was putting the country at risk, and that he was a young, untested president. He was maybe cowardly. He was physically not fit. So they just felt, for the good of the nation, that as painful as it probably was to do, he had to be removed. That’s what I think the consensus finally was about him. And Dulles would have been the person, as the executor of this kind of security wing of the American establishment, who would have been given this job.

MJ: Given that exploring these theories has been perceived as a career-killer, did you not have those same fears yourself?

DT: If you have fears at 63 after a career in journalism like I have, taking the risks I have, then you don’t belong in journalism. That’s what journalism should be all about: taking risks and asking the questions that no one else is.

MJ: Alright, last question for you. Connection cuts out. MJ calls DT back.

DT: Aaron? There you are. They’re fucking with us again! The NSA!

MJ: The NSA, of course. Okay, so: When the Devil’s Chessboard movie comes out, who should play Allen Dulles?

DT: Laughs. That’s a very good question. In fact, the book is being read widely in Hollywood now, and I have no idea. But there have been some interesting suggestions. One is William Hurt, who kind of looks like him now in his older age. You know, to tell you the truth, we’ll see if Hollywood will be willing to take this on. Brothers had a long and winding road in Hollywood. And it was about to go many different times and then the plug was pulled on it. I still think this is kind of a verboten subject in Hollywood, particularly the Kennedy stuff. But, you know, we’ll see. We’ll see if they’re braver with this one.

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You Think the NSA Is Bad? Meet Former CIA Director Allen Dulles.

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We Asked a "Game of Thrones" Language Guru to Translate Trump into Dothraki

by BobMoowattin Posted on September 29, 2015

Mother Jones

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David J. Peterson might just have the brainiest job in Hollywood. He’s a conlanger, a guy who constructs languages. You may have heard some of his work on fantasy TV shows like Defiance, Star-Crossed, and Game of Thrones—Dothrakis and Valyrians both spew his handiwork. And no, these languages aren’t just well-organized jibberish. A true conlang (constructed language) behaves like a natural language, with its own logic and structure, as Peterson explains in his new book, The Art of Language Invention, out this week.

Drawing on his academic background in linguistics, Peterson began creating new tongues in 2000. He penned “The Conlang Manifesto” and in 2007 co-founded the Language Creation Society, a network and website with online resources for people who want to get serious about conlanging.

The Art of Language Invention, part technical manual and part linguistics lesson, is chock full of funny pop-culture references—Prince, Back to the Future, the Miami Heat. Even if you’re not a conlanger wannabe, it’s a worthwhile read on the origins of language and the way words reflect and shape our behavior. Down below, we highlight some of Peterson’s advice for language constructors, but first, we asked him to translate a handful of 2016 presidential campaign slogans into his own tongues. Behold…

The Conlanguage of Politics

Dothraki for “Make America great again!” Gage Skidmore

Kinuk’aaz (from Defiance) for “Jeb!” Gage Skidmore

Castithan (from Defiance) for “A political revolution is coming.” AFGE

Trigedasleng (from The 100) for “It’s your time.” Brett Weinstein

High Valyrian (from Game of Thrones) for “Reform. Growth. Safety.” (Guess that one didn’t work out for Scott Walker, who fled the GOP race like a wildling escaping a white walker.) Gage Skidmore

And now here are six things you’ll want to know before you set out to construct a tongue of your own:

1. Never confuse a conlang with a fictional language. In a famous scene from Return of the Jedi, Princess Leia repeats the Ubese word “yotó” to say several very different things. Though Ubese supposedly existed in the Star Wars universe, it was haphazard and never fully fleshed out—hence, a fictional language. Same with Simcity’s Simlish and the gibberish spoken by the minions in Despicable Me. Mischaracterizing a fake language as a conlang will make you look foolish, Peterson warns.

2. Be clear about your intent. Otherwise, you could end up with a “malformed mutant” that doesn’t serve any purpose, such as Peterson’s first language, Megdevi—a moniker that combined his own name with his then-girlfriend’s. (“The rest of the language follows from there…”) One sect of conlanging society seeks to create naturalistic languages, “pretty much exactly like those spoken here on earth.” Another branch hopes to solve philosophical puzzles. In Ithquil, a tongue created by philosopher John Quijada, it takes just two words to say: “On the contrary, I think it may turn out that this rugged mountain range trails off at some point.” Unfortunately, it can take hours to construct a single Ithquili sentence, so it’s “not something you’d pick up and speak with your friends.”

3. Know your history. Be intimately familiar with the people meant to speak your language. Otherwise, you risk polluting your new tongue with remnants of your own culture. Game of Thrones‘ Dothrakis are a violent nomadic people who live, breathe, and die on the saddle. They don’t need an equivalent of the word “please.”

4. Determine your acoustic economy. It’s up to the conlanger to choose the right sounds for the language. Unless, of course, a producer asks you to create a foreign and “harsh” sounding language, as Peterson was asked to do with Dothraki. In which case, you better hope for actors who take your language as seriously as did Jason Momoa, who played Game of Thrones‘ Dothraki king, Drogo—”the hulkiest, beefiest, dreamiest mountain of a human being to ever speak a crafted language,” Peterson says.

5. Give your language staying power. Always be looking for opportunities to promote your conlang via some other medium. Many sci-fi and fantasy novelists are looking for languages to use in their stories—”see if you can work on one of those,” Peterson says. “If those books get optioned, the language creators will go along with it.”

6. Don’t quit your day job. The best conlangers are unfailingly curious, “the type of person who would enjoy taking apart a stereo just to see how it works,” Peterson says. But you’re not likely to get rich doing this. For most people, the payoff is the satisfaction and possibilities the hobby affords. Ask yourself: “What do I want to say with this new language that I can’t say in my native language?”

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We Asked a "Game of Thrones" Language Guru to Translate Trump into Dothraki

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A surprising link between superintelligent robots, global warming, and mass extinction? Nope, not really

by AlphonsoChauncy Posted on September 9, 2015

A surprising link between superintelligent robots, global warming, and mass extinction? Nope, not really

By on 9 Sep 2015commentsShare

Hold on to your tinfoil hats, folks: Robots are taking over the world after climate change forces global mass extinction. Or, rather, with enough conjecture, coincidence, and frivolous shoehorning, you too could wring that argument out of a new paper by researchers at the IT University of Copenhagen and the University of Texas–Austin. If that’s what you wanted to do with your afternoon.

But you don’t need to — that’s what The Washington Post is for:

We’ve already heard of all the nasty consequences that could occur if the pace of global climate change doesn’t abate by the year 2050 — we could see wars over water, massive food scarcity, and the extinction of once populous species. Now add to the mix a potentially new wrinkle on the abrupt and irreversible changes – superintelligent robots would be just about ready to take over from humanity in the event of any mass extinction event impacting the planet.

In fact, according to a mind-blowing research paper published in mid-August by computer science researchers Joel Lehman and Risto Miikkulainen, robots would quickly evolve in the event of any mass extinction (defined as the loss of at least 75 percent of the species on the planet), something that’s already happened five times before in the past.

In a survival of the fittest contest in which humans and robots start at zero (which is what we’re really talking about with a mass extinction event), robots would win every time. That’s because humans evolve linearly, while superintelligent robots would evolve exponentially. Simple math.

Woahhh, boy. Easy. Have a sugar cube.

Climate change is bad, bad, bad news bears. But it’s probably not going to wipe out all the people. Don’t get me wrong: Rising sea levels, security threat multipliers, Peabody is the devil, keep it in the ground, carbon fee and dividend, etc., etc. But implying mass human extinction due to a warming climate is counter-productive in a country in which half the political populace suggests the threat is overblown.

Side note: Even if we did “start at zero,” presumably that would imply actually starting at zero. As in, no humans and no robots. In which case you can exponentiate zero until the robocows come home, and you’ll still be left with an arithmetic donut. Mother Earth wins every time — the deserts, the oceans, the bacteria — not the ‘bots. End side note.

There’s a lot going on in Lehman and Miikkulainen’s paper, but none of it is about climate change. (Dominic Basulto, the author of the WaPo piece, acknowledges as much.) The study itself is a relatively straightforward piece of computer science: Dump some biologically inspired learning algorithms into a population of simulated robots, tack on an evolution-mimicking step, kill off a bunch of digital bots (that’s the mass extinction), and see what happens. The researchers demonstrate that after unplugging a good chunk of the robots, “evolvability” accelerates; that is, the extent to which and the rate at which the digibots are able to fill abandoned niches increase. It’s an interesting result, and one that warrants discussion in the context of biological evolution.

But back to climate change, mass extinction, and the coming robopocalypse. Let’s assume “start at zero” means “start at roughly equal numbers of robots and humans, who are at roughly equal levels of intelligence, and who are more or less randomly geographically distributed, and then inexplicably normalize this undoubtedly high-dimensional description of the scenario to ‘zero’.” (Forget the difficulties of meaningfully quantifying intelligence and consciousness.) There are a handful of robots and a handful of humans. It’s basically Burning Man out there. Then, the argument goes, the robots really take off:

Think about it — robots don’t need water and they don’t need food — all they need is a power source and a way to constantly refine the algorithms they use to make sense of the world around them. If they figure out how to stay powered up after severe and irreversible climate change impacts – perhaps by powering up with solar power as they did in the Hollywood film “Transcendence” — robots could quickly prove to be “fitter” than humans in responding to any mass extinction event.

They also might just sit around and rust in the sun. What’s motivating them to survive? Part of the problem here is that we also don’t really know what “evolvability” is. A 2008 review in Nature Reviews Genetics by Massimo Pigliucci states that, traditionally, “the term has been used to refer to different, if partly overlapping, phenomena.” It’s also unclear whether or not an organism can actually evolve evolvability.

Setting those difficulties aside, in assessing the Robo-Climate Wars scenario, we’re still left poking at the unparalleled uncertainty that hovers around the Singularity — the term used to describe the moment at which runaway artificial intelligence surpasses that of mankind. Some researchers argue the moment could come within the next ten years. Others say it won’t be less than a hundred (if ever). Basulto’s argument in The Washington Post rests on the temporal convergence of a climate-change-induced mass extinction and the dawn of superintelligence. Which seems a tad unlikely. And even if you buy, say, 2050 as an extinction date and as the hockey stick uptick for the Singularity, we’re still left with the assumption that human evolution and robot evolution will somehow be qualitatively and quantitatively different from one another. Which should give us pause.

While Basulto writes that “humans evolve linearly,” that idea is not at all settled in the evolutionary biology community. (Nor is “linear evolution” particularly well-defined in the first place. Linear? By what metric?) Some futurists argue — and it’s mostly futurists having these conversations — that as soon as we’ve developed robots capable of superintelligence (which ostensibly implies nonlinear evolution) we’ll have cracked the code of our own brains. In which case the same argument that applies to the robots in Lehman and Miikkulainen’s paper will apply to us, too, and we should spend more time worrying about climate change and less time worrying about the rise of our robot overlords.

Besides, by 2045, we’re supposed to be able to upload our brains to achieve immortality. As long as we’re cherry-picking futurist tidbits, we might as well cling to that one.

Source:

Extinction Events Can Accelerate Evolution

, PLOS One.

The strange link between global climate change and the rise of the robots

, The Washington Post.

How mass extinctions can accelerate robot evolution

, Kurzweil AI.

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A surprising link between superintelligent robots, global warming, and mass extinction? Nope, not really

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Hungry Arctic mosquitos are coming for you, Rudolph

by MauriciWestall Posted on August 3, 2015

Hungry Arctic mosquitos are coming for you, Rudolph

By on 3 Aug 2015commentsShare

Hollywood has done a bang-up job turning harmless animals into terrifying killing machines. We’ve seen birds peck out eyes, ants rampage through towns, slugs eat people from the inside out, and bees kill by the thousands. And now, coming to a climate-changed Earth near you, giant mosquitos hungry enough to kill small animals and send 300-pound caribou running for the hills! “They’re aggressive because they’re desperate …”

Unfortunately, that’s not a soundbite from the latest animal-themed horror movie trailer. It’s an actual quote from Lauren Culler, an ecologist at Dartmouth’s Institute of Arctic Studies. Motherboard accompanied Culler on a research trip to a small town in West Greenland, where climate change is giving these little devil bugs a leg up on their caribou prey. Here’s the scoop from Motherboard:

When mosquitoes emerge is dictated by their incredible sensitivity to temperature. In fact, a Greenlandic mosquito egg won’t hatch until it’s been frozen and then warmed. Because mosquito ponds are so shallow, they’re one of the first things on the landscape to thaw, so in years when spring comes early, the mosquitoes come early.

“… when spring comes early, the mosquitoes come early.” Come on — this is kitchy horror flick gold! OK OK, back to the science:

While the biology of a mosquito is driven by temperature, the biology of a caribou is driven by seasonal changes in day length which are unaffected by climate change. Every spring they migrate from the coastal town of Sisimiut, where winters are milder, to Kangerlussuaq to birth their calves. In the past, their cycle was timed so their arrival coincided with when the fields were filled with young, nutritious plants and the mosquitoes were not yet biting. But as the Arctic warms, the plants sprout earlier, leaving the caribou older, tougher, and less nutritious options. …

Meanwhile, the mosquitoes have reached adulthood and are ready to dine. Unlike humans who can swat mosquitoes, wear nets and repellants or retreating indoors, caribou only have one form of defense of mosquitoes: they can run. They’ll run to windy locations, and even on top of glaciers to avoid mosquito harassment.

To be fair, the mosquitos aren’t actually that giant. A picture in the Motherboard article showing a few of them lying next to a mechanical pencil reveals the biggest specimens to be just a few millimeters long. Still, those fleeing caribou aren’t complete wimps — the bloodsuckers have been known to kill caribou calves. And that’s not just bad news for Rudolph, it’s also bad news for all the people who like to eat Rudolph. In 2011, Greenland (population 56,000) hunted more than 12,056 caribou, according to Motherboard.

On the bright side, “… the mosquitoes have reached adulthood and are ready to dine.” Hollywood: Please, do what you do best and turn this shitty situation into the kind of mindless entertainment that people will go pay $10 to see at the mall. Here’s some inspiration:

Source:
Why Giant Mosquitoes Are Suddenly Swarming Greenland

, Motherboard.

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Hungry Arctic mosquitos are coming for you, Rudolph

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Meryl Streep Is Pushing Congress to Finally Revive the Equal Rights Amendment

by nortom23 Posted on June 24, 2015

Mother Jones

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On Tuesday, Meryl Streep sent all 535 members of Congress a letter urging them to bring back the Equal Rights Amendment in order to finally ratify it into the Constitution.

“I am writing to ask you to stand up for equality—for your mother, your daughter, your sister, your wife or yourself—by actively supporting the Equal Rights Amendment,” the letter read.

Accompanying Streep’s letter was a copy of “Equal Means Equal” written by EPA Coalition president Jessica Neuwirth.

“The ERA is not just a women’s rights issue—it will have a meaningful benefit for the whole human family,” she added.

Congress passed the Equal Rights Amendment back in 1972 and thirty-five states ratified it but that was three ratifications short of the constitutional requirement.

Streep, who will be starring as British suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst this October, has long been a vocal advocate for women’s rights and has also spoken out against rampant ageism against women in Hollywood. During Patricia Arquette’s impassioned acceptance speech at this year’s Oscars, Streep was seen cheering enthusiastically in support of Arquette’s call for gender equality.

In her letter on Tuesday, the Oscar-winning actress called on Congress to revive the issue for a “whole new generation of women and girls are talking about equality—equal pay, equal protection from sexual assault, equal rights.”

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Meryl Streep Is Pushing Congress to Finally Revive the Equal Rights Amendment

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Michael B. Jordan Just Slammed People Who Can’t Deal With One of The Fantastic Four Being Black—And It’s Great

by MaddisoLachance Posted on May 24, 2015

Mother Jones

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These days, when the fate of the world hangs in the balance, the superheroes that end up saving the day are normally straight, white men—at least on the big screen.

While Marvel’s comics have become increasingly more diverse over the years with a half-black, half-Hispanic Spiderman and a female version of Thor, its cinematic universe remains largely male and whitewashed. This is why the backlash to Michael B. Jordan being cast in the highly-anticipated reboot of Fantastic Fouris so disheartening. When the actor was originally confirmed to play Johnny Storm a.k.a the Human Torch, naysayers took to social media to complain about the black actor would be playing a traditionally white character. (When TMZ asked what he thought of the criticism, Jordan quipped: “They’re still going to see the movie anyway.”)

Attention, trolls and comic book purists: The idea that Jordan shouldn’t be Johnny Storm because he’s black is misguided, because, you know, comic books are fictional and so are the movies. Anyone can fill these roles and do a great job (see Idris Elba as a Norse god in Thor).

In an essay published Friday in Entertainment Weekly, Jordan slammed people who are having a hard time accepting that in the new movie only three of the fantastic four are white.

This is a family movie about four friends—two of whom are myself and Kate Mara as my adopted sister—who are brought together by a series of unfortunate events to create unity and a team. That’s the message of the movie, if people can just allow themselves to see it.

Sometimes you have to be the person who stands up and says, “I’ll be the one to shoulder all this hate. I’ll take the brunt for the next couple of generations.” I put that responsibility on myself. People are always going to see each other in terms of race, but maybe in the future we won’t talk about it as much. Maybe, if I set an example, Hollywood will start considering more people of color in other prominent roles, and maybe we can reach the people who are stuck in the mindset that “it has to be true to the comic book.” Or maybe we have to reach past them.

To the trolls on the Internet, I want to say: Get your head out of the computer. Go outside and walk around. Look at the people walking next to you. Look at your friends’ friends and who they’re interacting with. And just understand this is the world we live in. It’s okay to like it.

Let’s sum up Jordan’s smackdown in one line: The Human Torch is whatever Marvel says it is. You can see how Jordan does in theaters on August 7.

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Michael B. Jordan Just Slammed People Who Can’t Deal With One of The Fantastic Four Being Black—And It’s Great

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Could LA’s $15 Minimum Wage Sweep the Nation?

by JeramySchlenker Posted on May 21, 2015

Mother Jones

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On Tuesday, Los Angeles became the third major West Coast city to pass a $15 minimum wage ordinance. Though the law won’t fully go into effect until 2020, it’s a huge deal. LA is larger than San Francisco and Seattle, the two other $15-an-hour cities, combined. It also has a much larger contingent of low-wage workers. The ordinance will give a raise to an estimated 750,000 Angelenos, or about 46 percent of the city’s workforce.

LA’s wage hike points to the potential for a major minimum wage boost to sweep the country. Although experts disagree about the LA measure’s impact on growth and employment, the City Council passed it by a 14-to-1 margin. The $15 wage polls well in LA and nationally, despite a dearth of national politicians pushing for such a large increase. If organizers play their cards right, this suggests a $15 wage could gain traction in other cities.

So how did it happen? The original proposal, after all, was a more modest one. The measure’s backers attribute their success to a combination of grassroots and national organizing. The umbrella group leading the push, the Raise the Wage Coalition, includes more than 260 local organizations from labor, business, entertainment, and the civil rights movement. It marshaled economic studies to justify a $15 wage and delivered more than 100,000 petition signatures in favor. But it also benefited from what organizers call “air support”—the national campaign to pressure Walmart and McDonald’s into implementing a $15-an-hour base wage.

“It created a narrative that made it really hard for council members to simply look past the realities of what hard-working people are experiencing,” says Rusty Hicks, executive secretary treasurer of the LA County Federation of Labor. “The facts and campaign brought to bear in LA were in many ways only a next step in the move to address income inequality.”

The organizers are already eyeing other SoCal cities. “It is not our intention to just stop in LA,” says Laphonza Butler, president of the Service Employees International Union in California and co-organizer, with Hicks, of Raise the Wage Coalition. “We need to raise the wage all across the region.”

The group’s next most likely contenders are Pasadena and West Hollywood.

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Could LA’s $15 Minimum Wage Sweep the Nation?

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Native American Actors Walk Off Set of New Adam Sandler Movie Over Racist Jokes

by GRTCollett Posted on April 24, 2015

Mother Jones

About a dozen Native American actors quit the set of a new Adam Sandler film, produced by Netflix, to protest the script’s portrayal of Apache culture and what the actors claim are racist jokes about native women and elders.

According to a report by Indian Country, the actors of “The Ridiculous Six,” a spoof of the classic western flick “The Magnificent Seven,” complained to producers about the offensive stereotypes, which include the naming of female characters as Beaver’s Breath and No Bra. One scene also has a native woman “squatting and urinating while smoking a peace pipe.”

Allison Young, a Navajo Nation tribal member and student, said the actors talked to the producers and told them what they found offensive. “They just told us, ‘If you guys are so sensitive, you should leave,'”she said. “I didn’t want to cry but the feeling just came over me. This is supposed to be a comedy that makes you laugh. A film like this should not make someone feel this way.”

Loren Anthony, another tribal member and actor, told Indian Country that while he initially had reservations about appearing in the film, producers had assured him the jokes would not be racist. But from the very beginning, he said, things “started getting weird” and what were supposed to be jokes were simply offensive.

On set, going to brawl out with Nick Nolte. #TheRidiculousSix #NickNolte #NMfilm #NM #film #SAGfilm #LasVegasNM #movies #NativeActor #Acting #Actor #hollywood #Comedy #NativePride #NativeAmerican

A photo posted by Loren Anthony (@lorenanthony) on Apr 21, 2015 at 7:31am PDT

Netflix defends the film as a supposed satire. “The movie has ‘ridiculous’ in the title for a reason: because it is ridiculous,” the company said in a statement. “It is a broad satire of Western movies and the stereotypes they popularized, featuring a diverse cast that is not only part of—but in on—the joke.”

“The Ridiculous Six” follows a string of flops for Sandler, whose recent films include the 2012 movie “Jack and Jill,” which succeeded in winning every single category at the Razzies that year. His latest production stars Nick Nolte, Steve Buscemi, Will Forte, and Vanilla Ice. A preview of what that looks like below:

Awesome time with all my fellow Native’s – Navajo, Apache, Comanche, Choctaw. Cherokee.

A photo posted by Vanilla Ice â&#156;… (@vanillaiceofficial) on Apr 23, 2015 at 8:14pm PDT

“Nothing has changed,” Young says. “We are still just Hollywood Indians.”

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Native American Actors Walk Off Set of New Adam Sandler Movie Over Racist Jokes

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