Companies that connect consumers to their music have been struggling to find a business model since the internet made freemium a thing, so two bits of news this week are curious: SoundCloud is laying off 40% of its staff. And Sony Music is going to press records again after a 28-year hiatus.
To call Uber’s leadership a mess would be putting it mildly.
Until Brexit, UK politics had been divided along fairly predictable lines for decades. The Conservative party, which long espoused the benefits of market liberalism, was seen as the party of the middle class. The Labour party could rely on votes from working-class areas. The Liberal Democrats were positioned between the two as a centrist party, while UKIP represented the right-wing populists eager to leave the EU and cut immigration.
The suicide truck bombing in Kabul that killed at least 80 people and wounded hundreds more Wednesday (May 31) was one of the deadliest attacks in recent years in the Afghan capital. The carnage close to Zanbaq Square, a bustling area near the presidential palace and diplomats’ quarters, was devastating enough to draw widespread attention in western media, whose latest focus on terror had been the Manchester concert attack in England.
Consider this series of events which took place in the month after a video of a man being dragged off of a United Airlines flight went viral:
In one testimonial on the film’s fan site, a girl posts a picture of her forearm where she has scrawled a tribute to the lead character in ballpoint. She shares with the camera both her love for the film and a row of razor-thin scars, relics of self-harm.
Dear ________
The build-up to US president Donald Trump’s 100th day in office has been, as is his custom, conflicted.
It was the summer of 2015 and The Wall was stoked. His life had just flipped over into an exciting new chapter. He was going to be “big and beautiful,” and he would stretch across the southern border of the US–almost 2,000 miles. And Mexico was going to pay for him! He was going to cost either $4 billion or $5 billion or even $7 billion. As if all that were not enough, he was going to stop crime and rapists and bring American jobs back!
On March 10, US president Donald Trump hits his 50th day in office—halfway through the crucial first 100 days. The president promised a clear list of things to get done over that period in his “Contract with the American Voter” (pdf). So, we’ve gone through that contract—a mixture of easy wins, direct guidelines, and weighty legislative ideas—and graded Trump on how well he’s doing, using a scale of his favorite catchphrases:
When now-US president Donald Trump took aim at Boeing on Twitter in December, the internet gasped collectively and the plane manufacturer’s share price fell 1%.
Some people watched the inaugural speech of US president Donald Trump and saw darkness. Others saw hope. Is one view correct and the other just wrong? Is there a middle ground on which we all can meet? And if Facebook is a filter bubble filled with fake news, and journalists, as the president has said, are among the most dishonest people on earth, who are we to believe?
Mary Tyler Moore died today (Jan. 25) at age 80. Moore was a comic genius who a blazed a new path for modern female entertainers when she broke out of her role as the charming suburban wife in The Dick Van Dyke Show to star in her own sitcom, The Mary Tyler Moore Show.
Now that we’re in the first week of president Trump’s term, we’re ready to move past the debate about the size of the crowd at his inauguration and on to more substantive news. Much of the mainstream press has weighed in. As of the writing of this article the front page of Breitbart is leading with other news about Madonna. The Blaze has a rotating gallery with the following four headlines:
As millions of people gathered around the world to protest President Donald Trump’s presidency, press Secretary Sean Spicer gave an impromptu briefing in which he chastised the media for being dishonest, threatening to “hold the press accountable as well.”
Thousands of women are gathering for the Women’s March in Washington, D.C. today, the day after the Donald Trump took the oath of office to protest what is widely seen as a racist, sexist, and divisive political agenda.
It is not a surprise, of course, that the Republicans have set a course to dismantle president Obama’s signature health care law. That they have no clear plan in place to replace it, leaving millions of people with no idea if they will be stripped of life-saving treatment, medicine or hospitalization, is a travesty.
The season of giving is over. It’s followed by the season of returns.
In the late 1960s people were playing like crazy with two small heavy balls on a string. Clackers, once set in motion made an ear-splitting sound, were super-fun, highly addictive, and sometimes would explode.
Here we are again, at the end of another year. It’s our annual chance to reflect, to gather with family, to eat, to drink, to be merry! And let’s be honest…to hide in the bathroom for extended periods of time, tooling around on our phones to escape a hoard of crazy relatives.
In the quaint old days when you had to turn a dial to change channels, Americans depended on the nightly news to make sense of the political landscape. But if that was your primary source of information this election cycle, you got shortchanged on information about the issues.
In the aftermath of bad news, we struggle to make sense of what we’ve just learned.
Luckily there’s humor.
We’re only human. We see the world through the filter of our prejudices. This is why American voters can watch Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump duke it out for the presidency during the debates and construct entirely divergent narratives. He won! She won! You’re wrong! No you!
