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."

"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."

"In three large classes, men overrated the abilities of male students above equally talented and outspoken women."

"Nike terminated its endorsement contract with boxer Manny Pacquiao on Wednesday after he made derogatory remarks about same-sex couples."

"A new Snickers ad is being praised for featuring a model in a bikini who has been so badly retouched she looks deformed. The catch? She's on the back of Sports Illustrated's Swimsuit Edition, one of many magazines capable of doing sometimes bizarre things to images under the pretense of making mostly women "look better.""

"#FreeKesha trends again as judge denies injunction today against record producer Kesha has accused of rape"

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

"Facts are always the backbone of the show, Oliver tells NPR's Kelly McEvers. After sorting through lots of pitches, stories are aggressively researched. "You can't build jokes on sand," Oliver says. "You can't be wrong about something - otherwise that joke just disintegrates. ... You try to be as rigorous as you can in terms of fact-checking because your responsibility is to make sure that your joke is structurally sound." That's a lesson Oliver says he learned while working as a correspondent on Comedy Central's The Daily Show. It was Oliver's stint in the host chair - while Jon Stewart was away for the summer - that was a trial run for Last Week Tonight. Oliver talks with McEvers about the kinds of topics he tackles on the show, casting dogs as Supreme Court justices, and his aspirations for next season."

"One day in February 2012, after Whitney Houston was found dead in a bathtub at the Beverly Hilton, a man named Kevin Blatt checked into a room there. Blatt is a source for the celebrity news site TMZ. And at the Hilton, he forked out cash for photos of Houston's room service cart and of that bathtub. I got a whole pocket full of hundreds, he remembers. That's what makes the world go round - cash. That story is one of many unearthed by Nicholas Schmidle in his year-long investigation of TMZ. Schmidle writes about it in this week's New Yorker"

"These outlets, as usual,  omitted the rather awkward fact that this "ISIS plot" did not actually involve anyone in ISIS: At no point was there any material contact between anyone in ISIS and the Edmond cousins. There was, as the criminal complaint  lays out, lots of contact between the Edmond cousins and what they thought was ISIS, but at no point was there any contact with ISIS-the designated terror organization that the US is currently launching airstrikes against. This distinction may seem like semantics, but it's actually quite important when trying to accurately inform the public-only 40 percent of whom read past the headlines-about the reality of the ISIS threat vs. the fear-inducing media spectacle that so often inflates it."

To find out what the experts think, we typically rely on the news media. This creates a challenge for journalists: There are many issues on which a large majority of experts agree but a small number hold a dissenting view. Is it possible to give voice to experts on both sides - standard journalistic practice - without distorting the public's perception of the level of disagreement? This can be hard to do. Indeed, critics argue that journalists too often generate "false balance," creating an impression of disagreement when there is, in fact, a high level of consensus. One solution, adopted by news organizations such as the BBC, is "weight of evidence" reporting, in which the presentation of conflicting views is supplemented by an indication of where the bulk of expert opinion lies. But whether this is effective is a psychological question on which there has been little research. So recently, I conducted two experiments to find out; they are described in a forthcoming article in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied. Both studies suggest that "weight of evidence" reporting is an imperfect remedy. It turns out that hearing from experts on both sides of an issue distorts our perception of consensus - even when we have all the information we need to correct that misperception."

""I see the project as both colonialist and deceptive," Ethan Zuckerman, the director of the MIT Center for Civic Media, told me. "It tries to solve a problem it doesn't understand, but it doesn't need to understand the problem because it already knows the solution. The solution conveniently helps lock in Facebook as the dominant platform for the future at a moment when growth in developed markets is slowing." Before we go any further, let's unpack the two discordant narratives that underscore this debate."

"That won't be an easy task in today's digitally saturated world in which the likes of BuzzFeed and Vice have snatched up the audience that 20 years ago would have turned to MTV.  "MTV is a brand that's all about young voices, creators and a specific point of view, and it comes from this great heritage of music," said MTV president Sean Atkins. "And that's really what we're pushing the organization back to." Fierman sees a path for MTV News to reinsert itself into the pop-culture conversation. Just as MTV broke out in the early '80s, it involves swimming against the current. "They're all doing the exact same thing," said Fierman of his competitors."

"Movie producer Ross Putman reads scripts for a living. He sees countless female characters introduced in over-the-top, absurd ways that usually focus only on the character's body type, age and sexual attractiveness. So Putman decided to keep track of these female character introductions by creating a Twitter account called @femscriptintros. Each tweet highlights the ridiculous (and sometimes rather depressing) ways women are being described in screenplays."

"At their most noble, journalists act as a "watchdog on power," she says. But even when they fall short, Lindgren says her research shows it's important that they just watch. "The very presence of local media watching, research seems to suggest, acts as a check on political shenanigans," she says. If a community doesn't have a local newspaper or station, it usually means little to no coverage of things such as council meetings. Even if you don't agree with how a debate is covered, Lindgren says there's great value in the mere fact it is covered."

"In its fourth year, the #NotBuyingIt / #MediaWeLike hashtags reached nearly 60 million igniting a global conversation calling for better representation for all."

"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. "

"Consider the possibilities! "What if we did for buying mortgages," the voiceover asks over guitar riffs, "what the Internet did for buying music and plane tickets and shoes?" There are so, so many problems with this concept, the first of which is that lack of an app isn't what's keeping 36 percent of American households from owning a home. The bigger obstacles tend to be thorny things like poor credit, the high cost of housing, steep down payments, lender discrimination, multi-generational inequality."

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."