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"From Baton Rouge to Minneapolis to Dallas, it has been a fraught week in the United States. Tonight, University of Massachusetts Amherst Professor Sut Jhally is speaking at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts about race relationships in America. Jhally is the founder and executive director of the Media Education Foundation. He is best known for producing and directing films on politics, violence and social issues. Jhally spoke with WAMC about how he thinks the election of Barack Obama affected racial identity in the United States. The lecture is titled "The Crisis of Whiteness in the Age of the Black Presidency." It is free and open to the public."

" am energized by the idea of creating a framework for learning that weaves my students' interests with the desire to push their thinking around media literacy.  The course began with setting essential questions that would guide our inquiry throughout the semester.  The following questions captures the lines of inquiry students were interested in taking on at the beginning of the course: How does Media affect culture and society? What problems do we see with representation of race, class, gender and sexuality in Media? How do we critically examine popular culture and push back against the biased representation of race, class, gender and sexuality in popular culture?"

"Citing her Black Panther-inspired costumes, Malcolm X references, and Black Lives Matter messages, Fox Business anchor Stuart Varney snarked, "Is there really anything in America which can exclude race?" But Daily Show M.V.P. Jessica Williams is here to set Varney, Rudy Giuliani, and other Beyoncé critics straight. "

"That itch to glance at our phone is a natural reaction to apps and websites engineered to get us scrolling as frequently as possible. The attention economy, which showers profits on companies that seize our focus, has kicked off what Harris calls a "race to the bottom of the brain stem." "You could say that it's my responsibility" to exert self-control when it comes to digital usage, he explains, "but that's not acknowledging that there's a thousand people on the other side of the screen whose job is to break down whatever responsibility I can maintain." In short, we've lost control of our relationship with technology because technology has become better at controlling us."

"The city of Boston and the friends and family members of the marathon bombing victims will never forget the day when two explosions ripped through the crowd at the race, killing three people and injuring more than 200. Neither will the family of Sunil Tripathi, but for very different reasons. Their story is told in the documentary film Help Us Find Sunil Tripathi. Sunil was a gifted student from a high-achieving family. But in college at Brown University, Sunil began to struggle with depression. In March 2013, he went missing. His family organized a massive search operation, and - somewhat reluctantly - used social media to help with the search. "Despite how uncomfortable it was to take our personal childhood and smatter it across Facebook, we just knew this was what we had to do to get his story out," says Sangeeta. And then, the bombing happened. Three days after the bombing, the FBI released photos of the suspects. On Twitter, a former classmate of Sunil said she thought one of the suspects looked like him. That was picked up by reddit. And suddenly, the Tripathis' Facebook page was bombarded with hateful messages, many saying that, given his name and appearance, Sunil must be a Muslim terrorist. "This is not just one or two comments that would make Mom cry," says Ravi. "It progressed to having as many laptops open as possible and deleting every single post. It almost felt like a case study in mob mentality, in virtual mob mentality." Journalists saw the buzz on social media and started calling the Tripathis. Some retweeted the accusations. Others actually repeated them on television. The Tripathis, who had been waiting for their phones to ring with information about Sunil, were suddenly getting questions about his alleged involvement in the bombing. News vans lined up outside their home and reporters were knocking on their front door."

Wrong, wrong, wrong - to the very end, we got it wrong. Recently - as in Tuesday - the data journalist Nate Silver, who founded the FiveThirtyEight website, gave Hillary Clinton a 90 percent chance of beating Bernie Sanders in Indiana. Mr. Sanders won by a comfortable margin of about five percentage points. You can continue to blame all the wrong calls this year on new challenges in telephone polling when so many Americans - especially the young - do not have landlines and are therefore hard to track down. Or you can blame the unpredictability of an angry and politically peripatetic electorate. But in the end, you have to point the finger at national political journalism, which has too often lost sight of its primary directives in this election season: to help readers and viewers make sense of the presidential chaos; to reduce the confusion, not add to it; to resist the urge to put ratings, clicks and ad sales above the imperative of getting it right."

"MAYBE because I have seven nieces whose dreams matter to me, maybe because I have so many female friends whose talents dazzle me, or maybe just because I think it's madness not to encourage and recognize the full potential of half of the human race, I keep looking to the movies for something better. For something more equitable. For women saving the world or saving the president or at the very least saving themselves."

"Larry Margasak, a retired Associated Press reporter, examines the impact of fact-checking in the 2016 presidential race."

We reviewed 503 of the most powerful people in American culture, government, education and business, and found that just 44 are minorities. Any list of the powerful is subjective, but the people here have an outsize influence on the nation's rules and culture."

"When using technology, we often focus optimistically on all the things it does for us. But I want to show you where it might do the opposite. Where does technology exploit our minds' weaknesses? I learned to think this way when I was a magician. Magicians start by looking for blind spots, edges, vulnerabilities and limits of people's perception, so they can influence what people do without them even realizing it. Once you know how to push people's buttons, you can play them like a piano. And this is exactly what product designers do to your mind. They play your psychological vulnerabilities (consciously and unconsciously) against you in the race to grab your attention. I want to show you how they do it."

"Google, Twitter and Facebook workers who helped make technology so addictive are disconnecting themselves from the internet. Paul Lewis reports on the Silicon Valley refuseniks alarmed by a race for human attention"

"Oryx and Crake is speculative fiction at its finest. Part dystopian satire, part post-apocalyptic nightmare, the novel examines the flaws of contemporary society through the lens of an imagined future that could all too easily come to pass. But examines isn't the right word for what Atwood accomplishes here; eviscerates is more fitting. As in The Handmaid's Tale (1985), her classic takedown of totalitarian theocratic misogyny, the author's satiric wit is razor-sharp and unsparing. Oryx and Crake isn't a book for the faint of heart or the easily offended. Potential outrages include a narcissistic, self-pitying protagonist who treats women poorly, unflinching depictions of child pornography and sex slavery, all manner of unfettered consumerist debauchery, and (spoiler alert) the deliberate annihilation of the human race by a brilliant scientist. Oh, and corporations control the world, social and economic inequality are endemic, catastrophic climate change is a given, and science and technology, especially genetic engineering, are exploited purely for profit by said all-powerful corporations without regard for human consequences. If some of these details sound uncomfortably like the present, well, that's the point. Oryx and Crake isn't about the future; it's about the present. The book is about us. Whatever future ultimately comes to pass-dystopian, post-apocalyptic, or otherwise-we are responsible for it. This story is our story. "

"It's easy to believe that the human race won't be around for long, when you consider the state of the world today. But it's often been the role of the artist to bring us hope. That's why we've asked several illustrators this month to envision what humans might look like in 100 years as part of our monthly magazine, Future Human. You can check out the first and second entry here. This week's installment imagines technology as a positive force rather than one that will destroy us. Maybe we'll pour all of our workforces into a global cleanup crew. Or maybe we'll use augmented reality to build empathy and conserve resources. There are endless possibilities. Which fork in the road will you take?"

"A black man and a young Chinese woman are flirting, as he leans in for a kiss she thrusts a detergent capsule in his mouth and bundles him into a laundry machine. She sits atop the machine as the man spins and screams inside until, to her apparent delight, out pops a handsome Chinese man dressed in a clean, white t-shirt."

"If you haven't watched the performance yet, please do. In it, the best rapper alive performs Alright and The Blacker The Berry, two standouts off his latest album, To Pimp A Butterfly. Well, yes, that's the basic narrative of what he did. It was more than that, though. It was a piece of performance art, a pyrotechnics show, and an outright challenge to white America: Watch this. People felt uncomfortable with Beyoncé having her dancers wear Black Panthers outfits? Lamar walked out in chains."

Beyoncé has the right-wing commentariat gasping because she performed her new song "Formation" during the Super Bowl halftime show. The song is about, among other things, the way the mostly black victims of Hurricane Katrina were and still are ill served, to put it mildly. Its accompanying video mourns the black victims of undue police violence. And it includes other references to white racism in American history. (And, yes, Beyoncé and her backup dancers raised their fists in the air during their Super Bowl performance - imagine that!) Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York who cannot seem to grasp the idea of gone and forgotten, offered, as he often does, the most ridiculous take on the issue."

"New York's former mayor is not pleased with the Queen B. Rudy Giuliani, a onetime Republican presidential contender, rebuked Beyoncé on Monday for what he described as an "attack" on police officers during her Super Bowl halftime show performance."

"Attention: everybody wants some - social media, tech companies and more. Watch these talks to better understand the ways these entities try and get on your radar."

"We knew we could be champions because the ones we watched on TV looked just like us. And we had already learned that to escape to a better life, we needed to be wearing a jersey. The jersey became a cape; our talents on the field became the superpowers we were recognized for. We were black boys. And to be born a black boy is to be born into athletics. Black fathers are often disappointed if their sons aren't good at sports. Not excelling at sports as a black boy meant not being cool - even weirder, it meant not really being black. When you're growing up as a black boy, it feels like the world tosses you a ball and says, Good luck. Go get 'em, Champ. We all believed we were the chosen ones who could do the impossible, what we saw so many before us fail to do: make it to the National Football League. Eventually, I did. But most of the black boys I spent my afternoons with, playing in imaginary Super Bowls, weren't at the lockers next to mine. Most of the black boys who picture themselves winning this Sunday's game will never play in a real one. And that's fine: Playing in the NFL isn't really - and shouldn't have to be - every black boy's dream. But black boys don't always know that their dreams off the field matter. They need the space to see other, diverse possibilities for themselves. Black boys shouldn't have to feel that being good at sports is the only way to be cool - or to be valued by the world. A jersey isn't the only cape a black boy can wear."

"Diversity and inclusion were the big winners at the 91st Annual Academy Awards. In the years since the #OscarsSoWhite campaign, launched by April Reign in 2015, the Academy has added more than 1,500 new voters-an increase of almost 30%. And the improvements in representation among nominees and winners were evident from the start of the ceremony. Even though there were no women nominated for Best Director, and none of the Best Picture nominees was directed by a woman (despite many critically acclaimed potential nominees) there was still much to celebrate at this years' Oscars."