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The right has all the advantages, just as the devil has all the best tunes. Conservatism appeals to our selfishness and fear, our desire and self-interest; they neatly nurture and then harvest the inherent and incubating individualism. I imagine that neurologically the pathway travelled by a fearful or selfish impulse is more expedient and well travelled than the route of the altruistic pang. In simple terms of circuitry I suspect it is easier to connect these selfish inclinations.

This natural, neurological tendency has been overstimulated and acculturated. Materialism and individualism do in moderation make sense.

Verizon Communications Inc. wants to attract teens and millennials who are more used to watching videos on their mobile phones than on a TV in a living room. Yahoo! Inc., which is spinning out its main Web business, has been investing heavily in online-video content.

So it’s probably not a coincidence that executives at the largest U.S. wireless carrier were chattier than usual this week when asked the question: Would Verizon be interested in buying Yahoo’s Internet assets?

Chief Executive Officer Lowell McAdam and Chief Financial Officer Fran Shammo, using similar language, both said within the past two days that Verizon would look at a Yahoo deal "if it made sense," instead of declining to comment. 

President Trump asked the Pentagon “to explore a celebration at which all Americans can show their appreciation” for America’s military, so we might be seeing the first national military parade since 1991. Will it cost millions? Probably. Will there be counter-demonstrations? Sure. Is there a risk of terrorist attacks? Of course. Should it happen? Absolutely, and here’s why.

What about the cost? Americans love parades—and advertisers do too. Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade attracts 3.5 million attendees, and almost 50 million television viewers. The TV advertising revenue alone was worth more than $41 million in 2016. The Rose Bowl parade has a much smaller crowd, but nearly the same number of television viewers. CNBC says that participation in that parade “comes with a hefty price tag, but corporate sponsors say the chance to get their company's message out to millions is worth the expense.”

Unfortunately, military service never even occurs to many of America’s best and brightest. Since retiring from the military in 2010, I’ve run across quite a few people—young and old, but especially young—who have never personally seen, let alone spoken with, an active duty member of the armed forces (or even any veterans—who now comprise just 7.3% of the population).   

When she was a mere sprout of 14, Mary Beard tuned into the first episode of Sir Kenneth Clark’s famous BBC documentary, Civilisation, and felt a “slight tingle.”

“It had never struck me,” she wrote last year, “that it might be possible to trace a history of European culture, as Clark was to do, in 13 parts, from the early middle ages to the 20th century.”

on her way to becoming an accomplished classicist, would start to feel queasy. She became “decidedly uncomfortable with Clark’s patrician self-confidence and the ‘great man’ approach to art history—one damn genius after the next—that ran through the series.”

The attitude of young people towards tackling the environmental crisis is “a source of great hope”, David Attenborough has told MP

he predicted that polluting the planet would soon provoke as much abhorrence as slavery.

the naturalist and TV presenter said radical action was required.

But for the absence of a sea of “Keep America Great Again” hats and Rolling Stones soundtrack, Donald Trump’s coronavirus press briefings at the White House are, critics say, increasingly resembling his 2020 re-election campaign rallies.Some critics have even called for TV networks to drop live coverage of the daily sessions because, by carrying the president’s words unfiltered, they are actively misleading their audiences and could harm public health.

Broadcasters were widely criticized for giving Trump’s speeches and rallies wall-to-wall coverage during the 2016 presidential election, granting him free exposure worth billions of dollars in advertising. Although campaign rallies have been suspended because of the virus, there are concerns that history is repeating itself, giving Trump an advantage over his likely opponent, Joe Biden. On Sunday and Monday, the briefings shifted to late afternoon, giving Trump access to peak viewing hours.McCurry, now a professor at Wesley Theological Seminary, said he “tends to agree” with the view that networks should not carry the entire briefings live.“Putting it on because it’s better than whatever else is available to daytime TV is not a good reason. It shouldn’t be a platform for the president to just give out his own message. It’s not reality television,” he said.

Perhaps sensing political opportunity, Trump moved swiftly to regain the limelight and become master of ceremonies. At times, he has reassured viewers with an uncharacteristically solemn tone. But at others, he has reverted to his buccaneering style, over-promising vaccines or therapies – forcing experts to contradict him – or throwing a tantrum at a reporter who challenged him.

The point of the Trump app, social media accounts and Web TV was not just to keep me informed — it was to replace some of the news I might be getting from other outlets. “Forget the mainstream media,” went one ad that played at the start of the daily Trump video broadcasts. “Get your facts from the source.” 

On the app was a world where the president's agenda was so obviously successful that the media and Democrats had to lie and smear to cover it up.

Trump video content was varied but reliable.

to understand the ways in which Donald Trump’s presidency is systematically corrupting the American mind

The book is Peter Pomerantsev’s “Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible.”

at its heart it’s the tale of the substitution of reality with “reality,” of factual truth with interpretive possibility.

But an image? One never says a picture is true or false. It either captures your attention or it doesn’t. The more TV we watched, the more we expected – and with our finger on the remote, the more we demanded – that not just our sitcoms and cop procedurals and other “junk TV” be entertaining but also our news and other issues of import.

This was, in spirit, the vision that Huxley predicted way back in 1931, the dystopia my father believed we should have been watching out for. He wrote:

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture.

Detained journalist Roman Protasevich has again appeared on Belarusian state media, to the concern of government critics who fear the young dissident is being forced to address the nation under duress.

The 26-year-old told Belarusian state TV channel ONT on Thursday that he has "pleaded guilty" to organizing large-scale "unsanctioned protests" following the country's disputed elections last August

Protasevich was arrested on May 23 after his Ryanair flight was grounded in Minsk, sparking outrage from Western governments. Critics of the government of longtime President Alexander Lukashenko believe Protasevich's media appearances while in state custody are done under duress.

we examine generational/time period trends in media use in nationally representative samples of 8th, 10th, and 12th graders in the United States, 1976–2016

Digital media use has increased considerably, with the average 12th grader in 2016 spending more than twice as much time online as in 2006

time online, texting, and on social media totaling to about 6 hr a day by 2016

We have reached the tragic endpoint of President Trump's war on truth.

Trump and his media allies continue to contest the results. Baseless "Trump won" conspiracy theories continue to fill up social media feeds and far-right-wing TV shows

As CNN's Daniel Dale noted on Monday, "almost nothing Trump is saying about the election is true."

It has even started ripping off other apps’ best features, an art pioneered by Facebook that ByteDance is taking to another level. TikTok Stories was announced earlier this month.

ts videos were once no more than 15 or 60 seconds long. Now they can last up to three minutes. Until February, TikTok was predominately a mobile app. Now you can watch videos through your web browser, or even your smart TV. It once had a single video format, then incorporated live streaming. It allows you to buy products through the app, and to tip your favourite creators.

With its 732 million monthly active users, TikTok is the app of the moment, and likely the app of the future. It’s the new Facebook.

Pop culture says a lot about the hopes we have for politics. And in a politically polarized and unequal society, we express our political identities as tastes

We aren’t just divided into red and blue America. We divide ourselves into Fox people versus CNN people, country music versus hip-hop people and reality TV versus prestige drama people. The lines are not fixed — there is always crossover — but they are rooted in something fundamental: identity. Our imagined Americas are as divided as our news cycles.

a working paper by two sociologists, Clayton Childress at the University of Toronto and Craig Rawlings at Duke University. The paper is titled “When Tastes Are Ideological: The Asymmetric Foundations of Cultural Polarization.” It is part of the subfield of sociology that studies how culture reflects and reproduces inequality. Childress and Rawlings draw out several asymmetries in how liberals and conservatives consume cultural objects like music and television.

In a healthy society, the early-20th-century Dutch prime minister and theologian Abraham Kuyper observed, there are a variety of spheres, each with its own social function. There is the state, the church, the family, the schools, science, business, the trades, etc. Each of these spheres, he continued, has its own rules and possesses its own integrity and correct way of doing things. Each sphere is a responsible zone of flourishing.

ou can clarify what any particular sphere’s responsibility is by asking questions like: What is a school for? What is a science lab for? What is a baseball team for?

In our country, the business sphere has sometimes tried to take over the education sphere — to run schools like a business. But if you run a school or university on the profit-maximization mentality, you will trample over the mission of what a school is for — the cultivation of the student, the mission of pure research.

In politics, “the American dream” has long been used aspirationally, to evoke family and home. But as my colleague Jazmine Ulloa detailed earlier this year, the phrase has also lately been used ominously, especially by conservative politicians, to describe a certain way of life in danger of being stolen by outsiders.

The typical counterargument, both in politics and pop culture, has been that immigrants pursuing their ambitions help to strengthen all of America

recent stories have complicated this idea by questioning whether the dream itself — or, at least, defining that dream in mostly material terms — can be toxic.

I feel very lucky to have entered the conservative movement when I did, back in the 1980s and 1990s. I was working at National Review, The Washington Times, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page. The role models in front of us were people like Bill Buckley, Irving Kristol, James Q. Wilson, Russell Kirk and Midge Decter.

These people wrote about politics, but they also wrote about a lot of other things: history, literature, sociology, theology and life in general. There was a sharp distinction then between being conservative, which was admired, and being a Republican, which was considered sort of cheesy.

The Buckley-era establishment self-confidently enforced intellectual and moral standards. It rebuffed the nativists like the John Birch Society, the apocalyptic polemicists who popped up with the New Right, and they exiled conspiracy-mongers and anti-Semites

As in the last “autopsy,” the GOP establishment will probably conclude that it needs to broaden its appeal to demographics beyond older white men;

what prevented this more widespread appeal in 2016 was having a boorish, sexist, race-baiting, egomaniacal, undisciplined nominee; that if only it fielded a more genteel version of Trump, someone who espoused essentially the same fiscal and social policies but with more empathy, they’d have won the White House, and will win it once again.

This conclusion would be wrong.

For almost a century the NFL has positioned itself as a culturally important exercise, and the audience has agreed on that importance. The league insists that its brand of controlled violence is important in the shaping of strong young bodies, important in the self-making of men and important in expressing something vitally American.

But lately the league seems more concerned with brand than with justifying its philosophy or grappling with a new reality.

“We’ve gone through 100 years of knowing football is violent, and the consequences of violence were always deemed to be acceptable, the benefits outweighed the cost. But that ended with Mike Webster’s brain. Are we watching with a greater sense of the danger, can we still fully give ourselves over to the experience of watching, and of saying, ‘Wow, look at what these bodies can endure, what they do to each other?’ Are we seeing a temporary blip in ratings or a kind of resetting of the NFL’s cultural power?”

Charlotte shooting: State of emergency amid protests

North Carolina's governor has declared a state of emergency in the city of Charlotte, after violence erupted during a second night of protests over the police killing of a black man.

Keith Lamont Scott was shot dead by a black officer on Tuesday.