By now, most people have heard of "the Bechdel test." To pass this famous three-part test, which measures whether female characters in a film are anything more than superficial, a movie has to (1) have at least two female characters (2) who talk to each other (3) about something other than a man. It seems like a pretty low bar, but at least 40 percent of films fail, according to BechdelTest.com, a site that crowdsources these test results. "Birdman" fails. The "Lord of the Rings" movies all fail. "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" fails. Even "Toy Story" fails. And it's hard to think of a movie that doesn't pass the Reverse Bechdel test -- where two male characters don't talk to each other about something other than a woman (according to the IMDB universe, some do exist). The Bechdel test has its critics. Some films with prominent female roles, like Sandra Bullock in "Gravity," don't pass the test, while other films that are male dominated or sexist do. But, as Walter Hickey wrote for FiveThirtyEight.com in 2014, for a long time the crowd-sourced information on the Bechdel test was the best data on gender equity in film that we had. Two years later, we're amassing more data that gives a clearer look at the real role of women in film. In a new project, Hanah Anderson and Matt Daniels at Polygraph analyzed screenplays for 2,000 popular movies, and broke down the number of words spoken by male and female characters -- "arguably the largest undertaking of script analysis, ever," they say."

"Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo, who became a household name after conducting the Stanford prison experiments, argues that our online culture is disproportionately harming boys, who watch more pornography, waste more time playing video games, and are increasingly bored with their sedentary office jobs.  The cause, Zimbardo explains in his new book "Man (Dis)connected: How Technology has Sabotaged What it Means to Be Male," is biological in nature. Men have what psychologists call "single-cue arousability," meaning one mere stimulus brings them closer to happiness, such as a naked person on a screen, when compared to women who require more complex stimuli to become aroused."

"Do you use media? That's why media literacy matters. Too simplistic? Really it is as simple as that. If you use media, then it has influence on you. If you use it a lot, then it has a lot of influence. Doesn't matter whether your preferred media is the latest iPhone or the Playstation 4 or the app Heads Up. Influence. Influence. Influence. And of course, fun. Therein lies the need. The potent combination of influence + fun.   Media is a central part of most of our lives and therefore deserves to be understood and thoughtfully considered, as well as enjoyed. This logical progression makes so much sense to me, I have trouble understanding why others need convincing of its value. They don't need convincing about the value of media, just the value of media literacy."

"Today's edition of The Boston Globe includes a fake front page that imagines the state of America under the presidency of GOP frontrunner Donald Trump. Although the cover looks like the front page for the entire newspaper, it's actually the first page of the Boston Globe's ideas section, which is tucked inside the daily edition. The ideas section is a Sunday edition of the Globe that combines a mix of reporting and commentary on major intellectual trends. Scattered with such alarming headlines as "US soldiers refuse orders to kill ISIS families" and "markets sink as trade war looms," the page is a fictional snapshot of daily news one year from now, about three months into Trump's imagined presidency."

"Expect to see more branded content in your News Feed, as Facebook Friday introduced a new branded content tool and updated guidelines."

"The final installment of "American Idol" closed with 13.3 million viewers, the highest viewership for the show in two years, according to Nielsen. "Idol" was the highest rated show on Thursday night in total viewers and in the 18-to-49 year old age bracket that is important to advertisers. The final episode was a two-hour celebration of the show's 14 years on the air. Former judges like Simon Cowell, Randy Jackson and Paula Abdul appeared on stage, while dozens of former contestants like Carrie Underwood, Jennifer Hudson and (a very pregnant) Kelly Clarkson performed. Trent Harmon was announced as the final "American Idol" winner, beating out La'Porsha Renae. The show was once a ratings juggernaut for Fox. At its height 10 years ago, it routinely drew 30 million viewers an episode, the sort of numbers that these days are reserved for National Football League playoff games."

"Lately, Hollywood has been taking so much shit for rampant sexism and racism. The prevailing theme: white men dominate movie roles. But it's all rhetoric and no data, which gets us nowhere in terms of having an informed discussion. How many movies are actually about men? What changes by genre, era, or box-office revenue? What circumstances generate more diversity? To begin answering these questions, we Googled our way to 8,000 screenplays and matched each character's lines to an actor. From there, we compiled the number of lines for male and female characters across roughly 2,000 films, arguably the largest undertaking of script analysis, ever."

"Australian teenager with more than 612,000 Instagram followers radically rewrites her 'self-promoting' history on social media (and launches new website)"

"U.S. Soccer, the governing body for the sport in America, pays the members of the men's and women's national teams who represent the United States in international competitions. The men's team has historically been mediocre. The women's team has been a quadrennial phenomenon, winning world and Olympic championships and bringing much of the country to a standstill in the process. Citing this disparity, as well as rising revenue numbers, five players on the women's team filed a federal complaint Wednesday, accusing U.S. Soccer of wage discrimination because, they said, they earned as little as 40 percent of what players on the United States men's national team earned even as they marched to the team's third World Cup championship last year. The five players, some of the world's most prominent women's athletes, said they were being shortchanged on everything from bonuses to appearance fees to per diems.

We are witnessing a great explosion in the way that human beings are allowed to express their gender identities. We are also hearing a lot of awkward conversations. What are we supposed to ... call everyone? A recent scene on HBO's "Girls" riffed on this problem, drawing a linguistic fault line down a Brooklyn street. On one side is a no-frills coffee joint run by Ray Ploshansky, the show's resident grumpy old man. (He's, like, 38.) Across the street, a hip new cafe springs up and instantly hoovers up Ray's clientele. When Ray crosses the road to eyeball the competition, he encounters a barista he can't quite size up. First he calls the barista "sir," and the barista balks, "Why'd you feel the need to call me 'sir'?" So Ray tries "female?" and the barista says: "Oh, 'female'? You a biologist? You a biological essentialist? Are you a detective?" So Ray asks, "What's going on here?" and a second barista steps in to explain: "What's going on here is that you offended they, and you offended me, so I think it's best that you leave." He does. The baristas embrace. The cafe clash took the language debate of the moment and personified its most extreme positions. On one side are people like Ray, who come off as clueless and offensive for failing to recalibrate their language to accommodate people who don't identify as "he" or "she." On the other side are "theys" like the barista, who can sound unreasonable and absurd when they try to police new rules of language that are still in flux. But in the subtext of the scene, a third figure emerged. The barista character was played by the younger sibling of Lena Dunham, the creator of "Girls": Grace Dunham, a young queer writer and performer who identifies as a "trans person with a vagina" and recently wrote on Twitter, "I hate, fear and am allergic to binaries" - and is also game for joking about how hard it can be to get everybody on the same page.

Last semester, a student in the masculinity course I teach showed a video clip she had found online of a toddler getting what appeared to be his first vaccinations. Off camera, we hear his father's voice. "I'll hold your hand, O.K.?" Then, as his son becomes increasingly agitated: "Don't cry!… Aw, big boy! High five, high five! Say you're a man: 'I'm a man!' " The video ends with the whimpering toddler screwing up his face in anger and pounding his chest. "I'm a man!" he barks through tears and gritted teeth. The home video was right on point, illustrating the takeaway for the course: how boys are taught, sometimes with the best of intentions, to mutate their emotional suffering into anger. More immediately, it captured, in profound concision, the earliest stirrings of a male identity at war with itself. This is no small thing. As students discover in this course, an Honors College seminar called "Real Men Smile: The Changing Face of Masculinity," what boys seem to need is the very thing they fear. Yet when they are immunized against this deeper emotional honesty, the results have far-reaching, often devastating consequences. Despite the emergence of the metrosexual and an increase in stay-at-home dads, tough-guy stereotypes die hard. As men continue to fall behind women in college, while outpacing them four to one in the suicide rate, some colleges are waking up to the fact that men may need to be taught to think beyond their own stereotypes."

"A culture jam uses the media of a dominant culture (corporate, entertainment, political) to criticize and subvert the intentions or values of that culture. Dominant (mainstream, hegemonic, commercial) culture generally aims to seduce and entertain you; culture jams typically want to disrupt or upset you, make you feel uncomfortable about the elements of mainstream or dominant culture that they are subverting. Here is an example. This was done by a student in a previous class as her Creative Remix Project:"

"Growing numbers of observers contend that the dominant public role of our time has shifted from citizen to consumer. Indeed, respondents in polls typically cite entertainment, shopping, and other consumer activities as their top free time preferences. Commercial media and public entertainment venues offer environments carefully constructed to avoid politics and real world problems that might disturb these consumer impulses. As people in global societies increasingly enjoy the freedoms of private life, it becomes increasingly difficult to communicate about many broad public concerns. The personalized society enables people to choose individual lifestyles and identities that often lead to disconnection from politics. Many citizens become receptive only to consumer-oriented messages about tax cuts, retirement benefits, or other policies targeted at particular demographic social groups. Culture jamming is an intriguing form of political communication that has emerged in response to the commercial isolation of public life. Practitioners of culture jamming argue that culture, politics, and social values have been bent by saturated commercial environments, from corporate logos on sports facilities, to television content designed solely to deliver targeted audiences to producers and sponsors. Many public issues and social voices are pushed to the margins of society by market values and commercial communication, making it difficult to get the attention of those living in the "walled gardens" of consumerism. Culture jamming presents a variety of interesting communication strategies that play with the branded images and icons of consumer culture to make consumers aware of surrounding problems and diverse cultural experiences that warrant their attention. "

"Nike's web site allows visitors to create custom shoes bearing a word or slogan -- a service Nike trumpets as being about freedom to choose and freedom to express who you are. Confronted with Nike's celebration of freedom, I could not help but think of the people in crowded factories who actually build Nike shoes. As a challenge to Nike, I ordered a pair of shoes customized with the word "sweatshop." Nike refused my order. A contentious email exchange ensued which was subsequently distributed widely on the Internet as an email forward. Eventually, news of the dispute was reported in major newspapers, magazines, and on television. You can read a detailed account of "My Nike Media Adventure" in the April 9th issue of The Nation."

"A preview of what the next wave of anti-corporate activism might look like. Call it Big Dada: speaking noise to power."

"Ninety seconds of storytelling. Under Armour's recent commercial featuring its marquee athlete and Olympian juggernaut, Michael Phelps, is just that and then some. Before we dive into the essence of what this ad represents, let's take a stroll down memory lane."

"Here's just a short list of things you're likely to see in some of these chest-thumpingly 'Murican TV spots: amber waves of grain, stars and stripes wafting in the breeze, explosions, and smiling Caucasian children. Granted, most of these things don't represent actual political issues. Political relevance aside, a bevy of (mostly conservative) politicians from, Lyndon B. Johnson to Gerald Ford to Ronald Reagan to (of course) Ted Cruz have employed this veritable art form in an endeavor to convince the voters that they should lead the free world. Because as we all know, nothing says "I got this, America" like a bald eagle soaring triumphantly over a mushroom cloud."

"In the 2 1/2 years she spent researching her book, Sales interviewed more than 200 teenage girls around the country about their social media and Internet usage. She says girls face enormous pressures to post "hot" or sexualized photos of themselves online, and she adds that this pressure can make the Internet an unwelcoming environment. "I think a lot of people are not aware of how the atmosphere has really changed in social situations ... in terms of how the girls are treated and how the boys behave," Sales says. "This is a kind of sexism and misogyny being played out in real time in this really extreme way.""

"While the sexual exploitation of women and girls is rampant, there are many ways that you can help combat the media objectification of girls. Whether it is through writing, petitioning or joining organizations that promote gender equality and balanced gender representation in the media, here are ways in which you can help stop sexual exploitation of girls."

"As newspapers and magazines struggle to survive, you'll probably be hearing a lot about "native advertising." It's a purposefully vague way of saying that online ads will look more and more like articles, making it harder for readers to tell the difference. And you'll likely see more and more cases of marketers getting caught trying to trick people. This week, the Federal Trade Commission announced its first-ever enforcement action involving native advertising. The clothing company Lord & Taylor reached a settlement with the agency over deceptive-trade charges concerning a story about the company's duds on the fashion site Nylon. The story was actually a paid ad. Lord & Taylor, owned by Hudson's Bay, also was accused of paying thousands of dollars to dozens of so-called online influencers - a.k.a. Instagram users with big followings - to plug a dress without revealing that they'd been compensated. "Consumers have the right to know when they're looking at paid advertising," said Jessica Rich, director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection."