#and i have interviewed a dozen times or more for a promotion to full time and they aren't budging

[fantastic-artemis]

How to find a job that doesn't make me despair to live

[kimbapisnotsushi]

here are some more miscellaneous post-ts headcanons but this time we're not going pro teams we're taking a walk on the side of your average working adult let's go!!

okay let's be real do we REALLY think lev is in charge of his own social media accounts bc i feel like that's a dumpster fire waiting to happen

i'm going to say yes because it's funny as hell

he tweets things like "lol i worked with [insert older veteran actor here] today i had no idea he was such an asshole" and gets frantic phone calls from the pr team like three seconds after posting

his instagram is also full of like. really blurry casual pics and just doesn't look professionally curated at all but the fans love him for it

i'm actually super curious as to whether he gets typecasted a lot and if so i'd love to know what it is

i want to say goofy comic relief side character?? so when he gets selected for a serious drama role nobody is expecting him to blow it out of the water but he does!!!!!!

also another thing lev does that gives his pr team a heart attack is when he posts anything vaguely related to his love life. which funnily enough are the only quality non-shitposts he does himself

like you've got the aesthetic silhouettes against a wall, the hands intertwined on a candlelit table, the vague tweets of "so lucky to wake up next to you. wish it would never end <3" and everyone's going WILD trying to figure out who it is

(and, well, nobody is going to notice shibayama yuuki liking the posts amidst all the other pro volleyball players who do, right?)

shirabu's got a rep in med school for having the worst fucking bedside manner of all time

well not really i think he's like. the kind where fellow/older colleagues and such judge him for it and they think that he could stand to be a LITTLE bit nicer but if he works with kids or whatever i bet the kids would actually really like him.

he's dry and straightforward and calm and takes them seriously and treats them like adults. the only thing he does to baby them is dumb down the medical jargon into an explanation they can actually understand

ugh shirabu actually makes me really soft for what an asshole he is

oh but if you're a bitch ass bastard for no reason he'll try to be as snarky as he can be without like. getting reported to hr or whatever

sorry i know this probably isn't how medical professionalism works irl once again i just think it'd be really funny

also can i just say that i think it's the funniest fucking thing that komi became an actor. like where the hell did THAT come from

i feel like he got thrust into doing a role for a class play during cultural festival season and got hooked on it probably? because literally when else would he have the time to get into/practice that kind of shit

that's probably a fun fact he drops during a magazine interview or something LMAAAAO

"yeah volleyball practice took up most of my time, and i never really thought about doing anything else. but then things changed in my third year of high school when i got cast for cinderella . . ."

speaking of fukurodani. yukie and kaori my beloveds

i skipped out on them during my managers post which i regret deeply and dearly so here they are!!

full disclaimer i don't know how sports promoters actually work i'm assuming they promote whatever sports games they are assigned instead of just sticking to one sport only? which means that whenever kaorie gets her hands on something that isn't volleyball she gets a dozen texts from bokuto moaning about betrayal and treason and all that

when kaori gets with someone she meets through work (so someone on a pro sports team) the rest of fukurodani are like "okay but he's a BASEBALL PLAYER" as if being a baseball player is the most atrocious thing a person could be

kaori's like "guys come ON i told him all of you were cool!" and everyone's like "now why in the world would you tell him that"

yukie has a decently popular cooking channel that is loved not for her yummy recipes or her aesthetic filming but because none of her kitchenware matches

she just collects whatever she likes + a bunch of shit that's been gifted to her and while it should make her kitchen look cluttered it's all just very cozy and lived-in

like. all her pots and pans are different colors and themes. no pair of chopsticks are the same. she has a ladle shaped like a dinosaur and a teapot glazed with magnolias on the side

her recipes DO slap tho she and osamu collab a lot

UGH i love them living nice fulfilling adult lives i wish that were me

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

April 30, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

MAY 01, 2024

This morning, Time magazine published a cover story by Eric Cortellessa about what Trump is planning for a second term. Based on two interviews with Trump and conversations with more than a dozen of his closest advisors, the story lays out Trump’s conviction that he was “too nice” in his first term and that he would not make such a mistake again. 

Cortellessa writes that Trump intends to establish “an imperial presidency that would reshape America and its role in the world.” 

He plans to use the military to round up, put in camps, and deport more than 11 million people. He is willing to permit Republican-dominated states to monitor pregnancies and prosecute people who violate abortion bans. He will shape the laws by refusing to release funds appropriated by Congress (as he did in 2019 to try to get Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky to smear Hunter Biden). He would like to bring the Department of Justice under his own control, pardoning those convicted of attacking the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, and ending the U.S. system of an independent judiciary. In a second Trump presidency, the U.S. might not come to the aid of a European or Asian ally that Trump thinks isn’t paying enough for its own defense. Trump would, Cortelessa wrote, “gut the U.S. civil service, deploy the National Guard to American cities as he sees fit, close the White House pandemic-preparedness office, and staff his Administration with acolytes who back his false assertion that the 2020 election was stolen.”

To that list, former political director of the AFL-CIO Michael Podhorzer added on social media that if Trump wins, “he could replace [Supreme Court justices Clarence] Thomas, [Samuel] Alito, and 40+ federal judges over 75 with young zealots.” 

“I ask him, Don’t you see why many Americans see such talk of dictatorship as contrary to our most cherished principles?” Cortellessa wrote. No, Trump said. “‘I think a lot of people like it.” 

Time included the full transcripts and a piece fact-checking Trump’s assertions. The transcripts reflect the former president’s scattershot language that makes little logical sense but conveys impressions by repeating key phrases and advancing a narrative of grievance. The fact-checking reveals that narrative is based largely on fantasy. 

Trump’s own words prove the truth of what careful observers have been saying about his plans based on their examination of MAGA Republicans’ speeches, interviews, Project 2025, and so on, often to find themselves accused of a liberal bias that makes them exaggerate the dangers of a second Trump presidency. 

The idea that truthful reporting based on verifiable evidence is a plot by “liberal media” to undermine conservative values had its start in 1951, when William F. Buckley Jr., fresh out of Yale, published God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of “Academic Freedom.” Fervently opposed to the bipartisan liberal consensus that the federal government should regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, protect civil rights, and promote infrastructure, Buckley was incensed that voters continued to support such a system. He rejected the “superstition” that fact-based public debate would enable people to choose the best option from a wide range of ideas—a tradition based in the Enlightenment—because such debate had encouraged voters to choose the liberal consensus, which he considered socialism. Instead, he called for universities to exclude “bad” ideas like the Keynesian economics on which the liberal consensus was based, and instead promote Christianity and free enterprise.

Buckley soon began to publish his own magazine, the National Review, in which he promised to tell the “violated businessman’s side of the story,” but it was a confidential memorandum written in 1971 by lawyer Lewis M. Powell Jr. for a friend who chaired the education committee of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that insisted the media had a liberal bias that must be balanced with a business perspective. 

Warning that “the American economic system is under broad attack,” Powell worried not about “the Communists, New Leftists and other revolutionaries who would destroy the entire system.” They were, he wrote, a small minority. What he worried about were those coming from “perfectly respectable elements of society: from the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians.” 

Businessmen must “confront this problem as a primary responsibility of corporate management,” he wrote, launching a unified effort to defend American enterprise. Among the many plans Powell suggested for defending corporate America was keeping the media “under constant surveillance” to complain about “criticism of the enterprise system” and demand equal time. 

President Richard Nixon appointed Powell to the Supreme Court, and when Nixon was forced to resign for his participation in the scheme to cover up the attempt to bug the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate Hotel before the 1972 election, he claimed he had to leave not because he had committed a crime, but because the “liberal” media had made it impossible for him to do his job. Six years later, Ronald Reagan, who was an early supporter of Buckley’s National Review, claimed the “liberal media” was biased against him when reporters accurately called out his exaggerations and misinformation during his 1980 campaign. 

In 1987, Reagan’s appointees to the Federal Communications Commission abandoned the Fairness Doctrine that required media with a public license to present information honestly and fairly. Within a year, talk radio had gone national, with hosts like Rush Limbaugh electrifying listeners with his attacks on “liberals” and his warning that they were forcing “socialism” on the United States. 

By 1996, when Australian-born media mogul Rupert Murdoch started the Fox News Channel (FNC), followers had come to believe that the news that came from a mainstream reporter was likely left-wing propaganda. FNC promised to restore fairness and balance to American political news. At the same time, the complaints of increasingly radicalized Republicans about the “liberal media” pushed mainstream media to wander from fact-based reality to give more and more time to the right-wing narrative. By 2018, “bothsidesing” had entered our vocabulary to mean “the media or public figures giving credence to the other side of a cause, action, or idea to seem fair or only for the sake of argument when the credibility of that side may be unmerited.”

In 2023, FNC had to pay almost $800 million to settle defamation claims made by Dominion Voting Systems after FNC hosts pushed the lie that Dominion machines had changed the outcome of the 2020 presidential election, and it has since tried to retreat from the more egregious parts of its false narrative. 

News broke yesterday that Hunter Biden’s lawyer had threatened to sue FNC for “conspiracy and subsequent actions to defame Mr. Biden and paint him in a false light, the unlicensed commercial exploitation of his image, name, and likeness, and the unlawful publication of hacked intimate images of him.” Today, FNC quietly took down from its streaming service its six-part “mock trial” of Hunter Biden, as well as a video promoting the series. 

Also today, Judge Juan Merchan, who is presiding over Trump’s criminal trial for election fraud, found Trump in contempt of court for attacking witnesses and jurors. Merchan also fined Trump $1,000 per offense, required him to take down the nine social media posts at the heart of the decision, and warned him that future violations could bring jail time. This afternoon, Trump’s team deleted the social media posts. 

For the first time in history, a former U.S. president has been found in contempt of court. We know who he is, and today, Trump himself validated the truth of what observers who deal in facts have been saying about what a second Trump term would mean for the United States.

Reacting to the Time magazine piece, James Singer, the spokesperson for the Biden-Harris campaign, released a statement saying: “Not since the Civil War have freedom and democracy been under assault at home as they are today—because of Donald Trump. Trump is willing to throw away the very idea of America to put himself in power…. Trump is a danger to the Constitution and a threat to democracy.” 

Tomorrow, May 1, is “Law Day,” established in 1958 by Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower as a national recognition of the importance of the rule of law. In proclaiming the holiday today, Biden said: “America can and should be a Nation that defends democracy, protects our rights and freedoms, and pioneers a future of possibilities for all Americans. History and common sense show us that this can only come to pass in a democracy, and we must be its keepers.” 

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[greaterblogston]

The Lonely Side of Salad: Writing Half of ‘Arugula’

Warning - This post will have heavy spoilers for Episode 44 of Greater Boston (Arugula).

Before the start of pandemic I was thinking about changing jobs. I had worked at the same college for nearly fifteen years. I loved it but things were beginning to wear on me in ways that were continuously frustrating. Then the pandemic grew to the point where quarantining was necessary and I found myself working from home, sitting next to my daughter, logging her on to Zoom kindergarten every morning. We did YouTube Yoga. I helped her learn how to ride her bike wearing masks in a nearby church parking lot. We even made a storytelling podcast. 

Then my college started rumbling about financial shortfalls. They laid off my boss. They promoted me and then told me I had to help layoff 12 people. Then a job I had applied for before the pandemic hit reached out and asked me if I was interested. I interviewed and got the job and was so distraught about what was happening at my current college that I accepted. 

I started a new job in June of 2020. I can not begin to explain to you how strange this was. We had meetings every morning to discuss what initiatives we were working on. I panicked about this every day. I was new. I didn’t have any initiatives. Nobody was talking to me. I’d get the occasional email, the odd request. But days would go by with no feedback from my boss or colleagues. I sat at home refreshing email and literally trying to Google what I should be doing for work. 

Soon after, my new supervisor quit. Then several other colleagues quit, more than a dozen key college figures. There was talk of a toxic work environment driving people away. I would come to find out this was true later. As more and more people left, this particular person would become my supervisor. I logged into work every day assuming I would be fired. My new supervisor was mean spirited, critical, and vindictive. I had full-on panic attacks. And the whole time, I continued to try and help my daughter survive Zoom school. My wife works in healthcare and clinics never close. 

I was writing Season 4 of Greater Boston at the same time and I was having a difficult time with it. The show we started was full of optimism and hope and I was sitting there thinking about how wrong everything was. The horrible day of letting people go over zoom was in my thoughts daily, and although I knew it would happen whether I was involved or not, my involvement left me emotionally devastated. These were colleagues I had tried to energize to buy into an unhealthy work ethic our college promoted - do more for the spirit of the place. We’re a family. We can do this if we pull together. And then seemingly overnight we were cutting costs, we were letting them go via a streaming service. Dispassionately. With tight legal wording. 

Meanwhile communication continued to be an obstacle at my new job. When people were communicated with, it was with derision and division. Faculty felt cut off from their students. Students were having a difficult time learning in a forced learning environment. Without face to face interaction, with only emails and forced sterilization of Zoom calls (cameras off, mics muted), the different unions and working groups were assuming the worst about each other. Everything was broken. Nothing felt like it mattered. 

At night I would sit and listen to music and ask myself this question. How did I get here? How did my life unspool in such a direction that was making me completely miserable? Obviously the pandemic played the biggest role but there was so much wrong beyond that. I felt completely cut off from my family even though we were spending more time than ever. I would break down into tears occasionally and it scared them. I would try to hide my emotions but then resent that I had to hide them. Even therapy wasn’t an outlet. It just felt like work. Zoom call. Discuss your feelings. Breakdown. (Nods sagely). See you in two weeks. 

So it was with all this in mind that I sat down to write half of Episode 44. Every character is in a precarious place in this episode. Leon is struggling with having so many characters and people to deal with, and Ethan’s experiments aren’t helping. Gemma is struggling to disclose that she actually has the spirit of Leon in her possession all while Dimitri has joined her, despite Leon’s pleading. Dimitri is struggling to find his place in Red Line, helping Gemma. And he’s struggling to give hope to Nica. And Nica is struggling to find any sense of hope at all. The only hope here is Omi’s offer to take a few of them with her. There is a comfort in her decision to sink into her sadness, to own it, to wrap it around herself like a blanket. Hope, after all, is a struggle. It’s work. At the time even though I was only at this job for months, I was applying for new jobs, telling myself it could be better, that I still had control. And I was exhausted in doing this. Not only was it taking significant physical energy, the emotional energy was draining - forcing myself to focus on a better future during an unprecedented global disaster that had left me numb at best, overwhelmingly depressed at worst. 

I knew I had to address these feelings with my writing. That’s how I best process most of the things I struggle with. I started Episode 44 over and over again and was not satisfied with it. It felt like the antithesis of what Greater Boston should be. There was no finding strength in community, no comfort in each other. I was reminded of a quote from one of my favorite writers, Richard Yates. “If my work has a theme, I suspect it is a simple one: that most human beings are inescapably alone, and therein lies their tragedy.”

This is of course true. But I’ve always subscribed to the notion that what unites us is the fact that we are all cut off from each other, and that we’re all looking to each other for comfort, guidance, and love. *Spoiler Alert* - there is even a line that touches on this later in Season 4. 

So this episode starts not with any of our main characters. It begins with people waking up, starting their days. And the only thing that unites them is that they are alone. They are alone and the sounds of their routines are being processed by Leon, who is also struggling to accept all the various characters thoughts and internal narrations. The sounds of people in isolation adding to a symphony of loneliness. In the episode description, I wrote the following:

[The morning routines slip back, one at a time. Someone is crying silently. We do not know who. Nobody speaks to one another. There is no talking. Nobody is together. Everyone is alone] LEON (pained) My head…I can’t — 

And then to top all this off, I have a character we’ve never heard from call their partner and tell him they’re leaving. They can’t deal with it anymore. It could be they’re saying goodbye to their partner. It could be they’re saying goodbye to...well, everything. I wanted to leave that ambiguous, but also hint that the loneliness of a life surrounded by so much possibility, vitality, people was too much for someone who had all that around them all the time and still felt impossibly alone to their core. It just doesn’t seem right or fair. Their partner composes a song to deal with his sadness. This is a standin for me, writing this episode. He writes and sings these lines:

If you dug yourself a hole Unearth the lonely dirt below You still won’t find, my love Space for loneliness to grow.

Nica gets the submarine at the end of this episode. Dimitri means it to be a signal of adventures to come, but Nica takes it her own way. She’s sinking, settling into her cell, her loneliness. There was once a fantasy of her meeting celebrities and getting famous, a fantasy of what she would amount to. But at this point in time, she feels her cell - completely cut off and isolated - like a ship designed to sink in the water - is all she can amount to. 

But it’s important to remember that this is a choice she’s making, just like Gemma is making a choice about not disclosing Leon to his siblings. To lead back to the conversation Michael has with Chelmsworth in Episode 11 - choice really does govern everything, even how you feel.

Speaking of Michael, it wasn’t originally intended this way, but we ended up pairing the sadder aspects of this episode with something completely different - Michael and Louisa going to meet Autumn West. Originally this was going to be parts of its own episode Alexander was writing, but we combined them not only to give people a break from the bleaker stuff, but to show the other side of this choice. Michael is with one of his best friends. He is apprehensive about meeting the wife of the man who attempted to kill him, but focuses not on that aspect. Instead, he focuses on the connections they share. He gets excited by what they have in common, not what divides them. 

It’s obviously not always that easy, but I think for me writing this episode helped reinforce that two things can be simultaneously true. We are all, in the words of Richard Yates, inescapably alone. But that by itself isn’t reason to despair. Hope and human connection? It is challenging, difficult work, but in choosing to look for our commonalities, even if they exist only in the way we are all isolated? We chose to not give in to something that can never grow for the sake of something that may. Loneliness is easier because while everyone says there are no guarantees in life, being sad and isolated absolutely provides one. I urge you to gamble on believing in something greater. 

[bobrosenbaum]

Demonstration, Haifa, Israel, March 2023.

The End Game

SEVERAL TIMES NOW, I've started to post about the unprecedented national crisis in Israel and the increasing liklihood of a showdown between the sitting government and the judicial branch, which would result in a paralyzed and prone country.

Each time I felt I had written something that could bring some value, the situation here changed, rendering my words valueless.

Along with this, the sheer volume of writings, opinions, predictions, warnings, etc., is so dizzying that I could post a dozen links to as many effective pieces written by other citizens as concerned as I, and also far more qualified to provide a worthy analysis.

So, let me just cut to what I see as the End Game.

THE END GAME FOR the governing coalition creates a State which eliminates the independence of its judicial system, to benefit the will of governing politicians. Of course, they want to do this for a specific reason; simply stated, they want to pass laws which cannot be challenged by the Israeli Supreme Court.

The unwarranted speed, deafness and vicious forcefulness that the governing coalition has used to advance their legislation is damning and depressing evidence that an unprecedented blow to Israel’s democratic system is indeed their End Game.

If Israel had a constitution, a bill of rights, or some other formal basis for protecting our system of government and our citizens from such concerted corruption and abuse, today’s national scenario would not be as frightening. But that is not the case. And this End Game empowers the governing coalition to usurp the traditional guardian role of the Supreme Court and to pass brutal, blatantly political laws which change the very nature of the system. For example, a law to revoke the rights of non-Jewish citizens to vote in national elections. Or a law to delay future elections until the desired outcome will be certain.

Grim imaginings? Unfortunately not. There already have been attempts by some extreme religious members of the current coalition to implement their power, for example, a proposed law to arrest women who arrive at Jerusalem's Western Wall inappropriately dressed. The statements just this month by the Minister of Finance Betzalel Smotrich about his desire for the Israeli military to "burn down" the West Bank Arab town of Hawara could, sadly, find legal support by some convenient new law that promotes the extreme Right's anti-Palestinian agenda.

Their End Game does not stop with just dismantling the judicial system. Another likely target for change will be mandatory military service for Israeli citizens – long a source of ideological discomfort by the orthodox religious community. The list goes on: the State’s recognition of civil marriage, the acceptance of Reform Jews as full Israeli citizens, the right for workers to strike or even to demonstrate, the right to perform abortions, the adoption of children by same-sex couples – these and many other present-day norms could be overturned with ease under the governing coalition’s proposed changes.

"After these laws pass, there will be nothing that limits the power of the government.” -- Yuval Harari

In a recent television news interview, world-renowned Israeli historian and author Yuval Harari also talked about the End Game. He urged, that instead of examining and arguing over the minute details of the coalition’s proposed judicial legislation package, “People should focus their attention on one question only: ‘What will limit the power of the government?’ ”

“Until today,” Harari added, “in Israel we’ve used a jumbled-up combination of basic laws, together with the legal power of the Supreme Court to tell the government ‘No.’ After these laws pass, there will be nothing that limits the power of the government.”

“It’s not important what is going on in Prime Minister Netanyahu’s mind right now. Who knows what will pass through his mind next year, or what will pass through the mind of whoever follows him? We need to be able to thwart the government’s ability to destroy our freedoms. What the coalition is trying to do is create a political atomic bomb that may not be used right away, but can still be used in another year, or two years.”

It's little wonder that hundreds of thousands of Israel’s active and highly vocal citizens have been organizing and demonstrating using every legal means – including the streets – for 3 months now.

BUT THERE IS A SECOND End Game to consider – that of the opposition (current members of Israel’s parliamentary minority).

Well, actually, the opposition doesn’t have an End Game, nor any real plan to help prevent the State of Israel from sliding into an autocracy (or perhaps a theocracy) fashioned by the extreme religious Right. As they have in the past, the opposition is relying on existing laws and political norms to serve them. That is the nature of democratically-inclined societies. But these very laws and norms are now the targets of the Right’s attack.

Opposition leaders have decried the ruling coalition’s End Game, laid every parliamentary roadblock they can, supported the unparalleled public protests we are seeing, and called determinedly for a halt to the shamelessly one-sided legislative process to enable a broader, more thoughtful national dialog over the proposed judicial reforms.

Yet they have not created an alternative End Game. Their request to return to a respectful discussion – whatever that means in Israel – is not an End Game.

On this day, as the democratic fabric of Israel woven over 75 years unravels before our eyes, we can plainly see the flaw that lurks behind the legal crisis now consuming our country. It is the failure of our nation to have produced an organized, broadly-based, formal set of democratic laws and civil rights – a Constitution.

As Yuval Harari concluded in his interview, “In the new situation that has been created we will need stronger defenses for Israeli democracy. The current basic laws and the Supreme Court will not be enough. We need to find other methods…I hope that this shock will bring us forward to a better situation, that it will move us toward a stronger democracy.”

A national Constitution must be today’s End Game for Israel.

Without it, Israel's institutions and its citizens will continue to be tossed about by self-serving, short-sighted, corrupt and incompetent governments, politically frail Supreme Court rulings, and egotistical, power-focused politicians.

And with tonight's protests enflamed more than ever in the face of another ill-motivated action by the country's Prime Minister, it's honestly difficult for me to see how Israel will succeed in reaching such an important redefining moment.

___________

Photo by Etty Ya'akov. Young people demonstrating in Haifa, Israel on March 18th, 2023, carrying signs that together spell D E M O C R A C Y in Hebrew.

[literaticat]

Very little of what was mentioned in my marketing plan on the publicity side ever materialized, especially not on the scale they were talking. Is there any way for me to determine why that is? I know that a lot of it comes down to luck and it doesn't necessarily mean someone dropped the ball or that all of the major outlets hate my book, but I also don't understand why my publisher talked such a big game if it wasn't likely they could deliver on any of it.

It's hard for me to say, based on the zero actual info I have and not being part of the process, seeing the plan, sitting in on the calls, etc. But (and forgive me if you know all this already), I can just say generally:

"Marketing" means things that they PAY for. Those things are often somewhat invisible to you from the outside, because in the book world MOST marketing efforts are really geared toward booksellers/librarians/gatekeepers rather than the general public.

Examples of marketing: ARCs / eARCs, sending ARCs or finished copies to specific "bigmouths", offering retailers a special discount if they buy x-number of copies or a display, "swag" creation, ads in trade publications such as PW, Edelweiss and Shelf Awareness newsletters, promoting at Winter Institute (big bookseller conference), regional bookselling conferences, and ALA (big librarian conference), wining and dining librarians, etc. There's a wide variety of things that fall into the marketing bucket, but what they all have in common is, they cost money and the publisher wants to spend that money in the wisest way they can.

(That's why they focus on booksellers/librarians/gatekeepers -- because if one buyer for a library system or a book chain buys, say, 100 books, has them on display, talks them up to patrons and customers and classrooms, etc etc -- and then checks out or sells them to the public and orders more, that's a better bang for their buck than trying to reach a hundred individual people randomly who don't have the power to reach lots of other people. Each ONE bookseller or librarian might be able to reach hundreds of people. A dozen booksellers or librarians might reach THOUSANDS of people. And so on.)

"Publicity" means earned media -- it doesn't cost money, but it's a LOT harder to get. The publicist pitches your book to a variety of media sources -- that could be anything from reviews in the newspaper to interviews in a magazine to keynoting a conference to a special feature on Good Morning America. The problem is, of course -- all those outlets have A MILLION publicists pitching them things, and they are in full control over who and what they actually cover. So they are mostly probably going to cover, frankly, things that they think their audience will be most interested in. Which often translates to "people they have already heard of" or "people with a quite resonant and unusual story to tell" or "people who are writing something incredibly timely" or "people whose thing has gone viral" -- or something like that. Basically, they want the clicks.

Unfortunately most "regular" books probably won't fall into those buckets. So of COURSE the publicist has to try -- but the hit rate is likely kinda low for MOST books. I'm guessing the publicity plan said something like "targeted outreach to major media, local media and trade review outlets (NYT, WaPo, LA Times, Newsweek, Sacramento Bee, NPR, PW, Kirkus, etc)" -- well OK. But all media is stretched thin, and even trade journals like PW and Kirkus are trending toward reviewing less and reviewing later than in the past...

So if the publicist pitched to, say, 100 places and only four decided to cover the book -- that doesn't mean she didn't do her job. She still had to write to those 100 people. (Nor does it mean the Sacramento Bee hates you -- they just only had room for 5 reviews and had 100 books to choose from).

ALL OF THAT TO SAY: I guess the publisher "talks a big game" in their publicity and marketing plan because they are so often accused of "doing LITERALLY NOTHING" to promote people's books -- because so much of the work they DO actually do is rather invisible. So they want to show, like, no, look, we ARE doing things.

(Do those things matter or move the needle? Eh. Sometimes. Mostly not, but sometimes. Are they doing them? Yep.)

[dankusner]

Zuckerberg to Jim Jordan

Here is the full text of the Zuckerberg letter on censorship.

It's a tremendously important text, admitting what has cost enormous amounts in time and money to discover and litigate. And yet here he admits it all. * * * * *

The Honorable Jim Jordan

Chairman Committee on the Judiciary United States House of Representatives 2138 Rayburn House Office Building Washington, D.C. 20515

Chairman Jordan:

I appreciate the Committee's interest in content moderation on online platforms.

As you are aware, Meta has produced thousands of documents as part of your investigation and made a dozen employees available for transcribed interviews.

Further to our cooperation with your investigation, I welcome the opportunity to share what I've taken away from this process.

There's a lot of talk right now around how the U.S. government interacts with companies like Meta, and I want to be clear about our position.

Our platforms are for everyone - we're about promoting speech and helping people connect in a safe and secure way.

As part of this, we regularly hear from governments around the world and others with various concerns around public discourse and public safety.

In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn't agree.

Ultimately, it was our decision whether or not to take content down, and we own our decisions, including COVID-19-related changes we made to our enforcement in the wake of this pressure.

I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it.

I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn't make today.

Like I said to our teams at the time, I feel strongly that we should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any Administration in either direction - and we're ready to push back if something like this happens again.

In a separate situation, the FBI warned us about a potential Russian disinformation operation about the Biden family and Burisma in the lead up to the 2020 election.

That fall, when we saw a New York Post story reporting on corruption allegations involving then-Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden's family, we sent that story to fact-checkers for review and temporarily demoted it while waiting for a reply.

It's since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn't have demoted the story.

We've changed our policies and processes to make sure this doesn't happen again -- for instance, we no longer temporarily demote things in the U.S. while waiting for fact-checkers.

Apart from content moderation, I want to address the contributions I made during the last presidential cycle to support electoral infrastructure.

The idea here was to make sure local election jurisdictions across the country had the resources they needed to help people vote safely during a global pandemic.

I made these contributions through the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

They were designed to be non-partisan -- spread across urban, rural, and suburban communities.

Still, despite the analyses I've seen showing otherwise, I know that some people believe this work benefited one party over the other.

My goal is to be neutral and not play a role one way or another - or to even appear to be playing a role.

So I don't plan on making a similar contribution this cycle.

Respectfully, /s/ Mark Zuckerberg Mark Zuckerberg Founder, Chairman & CEO Meta Platforms, Inc.

SOCIAL MEDIA

Meta backs up on post policing

CEO says firm will not automatically ‘demote’ possibly false content

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a letter to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, that the Biden administration in 2021 “repeatedly pressured” his company to take down certain posts related to COVID-19 and was “wrong” to do so.

“In 2021, senior officials from the Biden administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain covid-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree,” Zuckerberg wrote in the letter sent Sunday. “Ultimately, it was our decision whether or not to take content down.”

Zuckerberg also reiterated that Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads, had erred in temporarily suppressing a 2020 New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop and said the company has since changed its policies to avoid any similar move. Specifically, he said Meta’s social networks would no longer “demote” potentially false posts or stories while it awaits a verdict from its fact-checking partners. Instead, it will wait for the results of the fact checks before taking any action.

The letter to Jordan shows Meta attempting to mend fences with the political right ahead of the 2024 election, amid a yearslong, ongoing Republican-led investigation into the content moderation policies of major social networks. While President Joe Biden and other Democratic leaders have criticized the company at times for failing to rein in false information about the 2020 election and the pandemic, Jordan and other House Republicans have been vocal in accusing Meta and other tech giants of overreacting by “censoring” conservatives’ speech.

In June, the Supreme Court rejected a bid led by Republican state attorneys general to restrict contacts between the White House and tech companies. And in July, it threw out lower-court decisions that would have limited social networks’ right to moderate users’ posts.

Content moderation

Zuckerberg’s letter marks the first time Meta has weighed in publicly on the lawsuit brought by the Republican attorneys general, which alleges that the Biden administration’s pressure on it and other tech giants to crack down on COVID-19 misinformation amounted to illegal censorship. The Meta chief’s use of the word “censor” mirrors that of Jordan and other Republicans, as does his criticism of the Biden administration.

But Zuckerberg also said Meta’s content moderation actions were its own and not the result of government compulsion — a characterization consistent with the Supreme Court’s ruling that the plaintiffs failed to show a direct connection between government pressure and the removal of their posts.

“We own our decisions, including Covid-19-related changes we made to our enforcement in the wake of this pressure,” Zuckerberg wrote. He added: “I feel strongly that we should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any Administration in either direction — and we’re ready to push back if something like this happens again.”

Political involvement

Zuckerberg’s criticism of the Biden administration and pledge to pull back on demoting potentially false content was greeted as a victory by some on the right.

“Big win for free speech,” the House Judiciary Republicans posted on X.

The announcement that Meta will no longer demote stories flagged as potential violations of its misinformation policies could mean that falsehoods will circulate more freely on its networks before and after a contentious 2024 presidential election. Since suspending Donald Trump in the wake of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, Meta and other major tech firms have reinstated him and lifted restrictions on his accounts.

Also in the letter, Zuckerberg confirmed reports that he will no longer donate money for local election infrastructure through the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a program that some called “Zuckerbucks.” The Post reported this month that he would no longer support the program — potentially leaving funding gaps for elections in small jurisdictions.

“They were designed to be nonpartisan — spread across urban, rural and suburban communities,” Zuckerberg wrote. “Still, despite the analyses I’ve seen showing otherwise, I know that some people believe this work benefited one party over the other. My goal is to be neutral and not play a role one way or another — or to even appear to be playing a role. So I don’t plan on making a similar contribution this cycle.”

‘Conflicting reactions’

Katie Harbath, CEO of the tech consultancy Anchor Change and a former Facebook official, said she has “conflicting reactions” to Zuckerberg’s letter. While she said the effort to clear the air with House Republicans ahead of the election is understandable, she questioned Zuckerberg’s decision to address Republicans’ concerns but not those of Democrats, who see Jordan’s committee as applying undue government pressure of its own.

David Kaye, a professor at UC Irvine School of Law and former U.N. special rapporteur on freedom of expression, was more critical of the letter, which he called “cynical” and “obsequious.”

Zuckerberg’s missive, he said, “reinforces the sense of many activists around the world that Zuckerberg does not necessarily stand with his rules but can be swayed by government pressure — even while his letter tries to disclaim that perception.”

Meta declined to comment beyond confirming the letter’s authenticity.

[mamun258]

After interviewing with more than 20 companies, "I regret it"

After resigning, many people assume that they will take a few days of rest, plan a trip, and give themselves a small gap before restarting their lives.

Unfortunately, the gap between reality and ideals is always too big. When they get back together and start looking for a job, many people HE Tuber find that it is not easy to find a suitable job as soon as possible at the end of the year.

Jiayin took a break for more than ten days and started looking for a job. Dozens of resumes were sent out, but there were not many responses. Some companies were concerned about her lack of work experience, and some were unwilling to hire full-time employees at the end of the year.

The only job with progress was a customer service position at an online education company, but after passing the interview, Jiayin only worked for one day. The company HR gave her a probation period statement, which mentioned that within 10 days if the employee leaves on his own, the company will not pay the fee; between 11 and 30 days, if the employee leaves on his own, he will be charged 80 yuan/day. It was originally agreed that the salary during the probation period would be 4,500 yuan and lunch would be provided, but the description changed to a lunch of about 400 yuan per month, which would be deducted from the salary.

Jiayin felt that this company was not formal and the agreement completely put employees at a disadvantage, so she left the same day. In addition, Jiayin didn't even have a reliable interview. After she resigned, she was under great financial pressure, so she began to look for part-time jobs as a transition.

"In mid-to-late December, I worked part-time at an electric power company. My job was to prepare contracts for 2024 for the company's customers. I paid 200 yuan a day for a week. During the New Year's Day holiday, I saw a hotel recruiting temporary waiters, so I started working again. I worked for three days, and it was 200 yuan a day; at the beginning of January, I found a part-time job as an economic census worker, and successfully completed the data report for an enterprise, earning 20 yuan, and some people could complete 4 orders in one morning."

During this period of naked resignation, her total income was about 2,000 yuan, which barely covered her daily expenses. Looking back now, Jiayin feels a little regretful. She feels that her previous job was relatively easy, so she was a little impulsive in resigning. Nowadays, part-time jobs are not always available. When there is no income, she is very anxious and frantically checks the recruitment platform to submit her resume.

The problem Li Fei faced when he was looking for a new job was that none of his ideal companies responded, so he chose to invest in some smaller companies. After a few interviews, the results were still not satisfactory. She was forced to lower her standards and find a research assistant position as a transition. "There is not much room for promotion in this kind of position, and the development prospects are average. I plan to work on it first and then submit my resume in March or April."

Xiangxiang's troubles were accumulated through repeated frustrations in finding a job. After taking a short break after leaving her job, she began to submit resumes. In nearly 2 months, she interviewed more than 20 companies, and more than 80% of them were unreliable.

"I feel that HR people are all rushing to recruit KPIs at the end of the year, but they don't seem to be recruiting people at all, but completing recruitment targets. Many HRs talked to me about one condition on the recruitment software, but it was completely different after the interview. "

For example, she just interviewed for a company that promised to live-stream silver jewelry, with a salary of 8K-10K plus commission. She had informed the other party in advance that she had no live-streaming experience in this category. When she went to the interview, the live-streaming category changed to small-scale live broadcasting. Home appliances, and because she had no experience in the field, her salary became 7K + commission.

In an interview a few days ago, the other company was recruiting anchors selling down jackets. Xiangxiang said that she was 158cm tall and wearing a mid-length down jacket during a live broadcast might not be effective. The other party said that she could go over and try it on for a trial broadcast. When they arrived at the scene, the interviewer only asked about Xiangxiang's work experience and the reason for leaving her previous company, then hurriedly ended the interview and asked her to go back and wait for notification. The salary confirmed on the chat software was an hourly salary of 150 yuan to 300 yuan plus commission. During the interview, it was said that the base salary was only 8,000 yuan plus commission.

Xiangxiang was speechless for this type of interview. The conditions during the interview were inconsistent with those during online communication. "If I had known, I wouldn't have gone. It's like they were trying to trick people into getting an interview, wasting my time and energy."

Later, a friend who works in e-commerce told Xiangxiang that many companies do not really recruit anchors at the end of the year. They just take some resumes for a brief interview and reserve anchor resources in case of emergencies. It dawned on her.

She also noticed that the salary level of current anchor positions is generally low and the requirements are very high. The base salary of anchors who just entered the industry before was 8K, but now it has dropped to 5K-6K. For someone like her with more than a year of work experience, she can only pay 8K, it was even difficult for her to find a job with the same income as before. And it’s not that easy to create a new account now. Companies will find various problems with the anchors. "Even if our other account anchors have the same status, speaking speed, speaking skills, and the same people and background, as long as the effect is not as good as others, the company will still blame us."

Xiangxiang is now extremely frustrated. She is basically looking for a job in the Buddhist department and does not have high expectations for interviews.

3. There is a secret behind the naked resignation at the end of the year

The job hunting environment is grim, why do some people still resign at the end of the year?

On the one hand, all walks of life are currently facing some challenges, which will affect workers in the workplace, such as salary cuts, increased workloads, and high work pressure. Many workers are overwhelmed; another reason is that most young people have personality traits. Stronger, I hope to achieve a balance between work and life and the pursuit of self, rather than blindly sacrificing self to meet the requirements of work.

However, after actually experiencing naked resignation at the end of the year, many migrant workers felt that this was not a good choice.

Jiayin is now firmly opposed to resigning naked at the end of the year. She said that if you stay until the end of the year, the company will give you a year-end bonus, and the Chinese New Year holiday is also a paid holiday. There will be few recruitment positions at the end of the year, and you will not be able to find a new job after resigning. These are all gone. She suggested that migrant workers with little savings should wait until they find another job before resigning.

Qingqing believes that if a job has seriously affected your body and mood, you can resign naked. After all, health is the first priority. You can make some adjustments and recovery after resignation, try different work styles, and find happiness. But if you watch others resign and go out to have fun, or you feel wronged for a moment, or if you don’t have enough savings due to one or two special events, it is not recommended to resign naked at the end of the year.

The matter of resigning naked at the end of the year seems to be a personal behavior and highly accidental. In fact, there are many tricks behind it.

Zhu Jupeng, a human resources expert and founder of 51 Headhunting, explained to "Ding Focus" that naked resignation should be divided into several categories of people. For practitioners in traditional industries such as catering and retail, as well as most blue-collar workers, naked resignation at the end of the year is very normal. Many Those who leave their jobs directly before the Spring Festival and go home to celebrate the New Year may change companies, industries, or cities after the New Year. For this type of industry, it is normal for 70% of employees to return after the Spring Festival; there is also a special group of people with an annual salary of 100 Senior executives of companies with more than 10,000 yuan and higher levels may also resign at the end of the year, then negotiate for new positions, and officially take up their posts after the year. Their job search time is usually longer, and both job seekers and companies are relatively confident. patience.

The discussion on whether to resign at the end of the year mostly refers to professionals with an annual salary in the range of 100,000 to 700,000.

Zhu Jupeng does not recommend naked resignation, nor does he support choosing the time at the end of the year.

He believes that a safer approach is to do some preparation work while on the job, and to interview more to understand the latest market conditions. "Looking for a job is a low-frequency thing, but the job market changes on a monthly basis. People in the workplace have very different perceptions in this regard. Many people may have stayed in their last job for several years and have not been interviewed. I feel it, and only by going to interviews in person can I get real feedback from the market.”

Some of Zhu Jupeng’s clients often start planning before they resign. “I ask them to go for interviews while they are still employed, and then review the feedback to determine whether they should resign, when is the right time to leave, and how much improvement will they get during the interview?” Salary.”

In addition, the end of the year is not a good time to apply for a job.

He noticed that in recent years, the overall job search time to get the ideal offer has become longer than in previous years. Among his clients, some even took eight or nine months to get an offer.

Moreover, according to experience, November and December are the off-peak seasons for recruitment. “After most companies review their performance, costs, and human efficiency at the end of the year, they will conduct an end-of-year analysis. Businesses that have not been successful may need to be optimized and shrunk. At the end of the year, It is more about personnel optimization rather than recruitment. Most companies will not start recruiting until the company's talent mapping is completed, the business direction is confirmed, and the new budget for the coming year is confirmed," Zhu Jupeng said.

What should I do if I resign at the end of the year?

Zhu Jupeng mentioned that the resume is a weapon for job seekers. First, you must improve your resume; secondly, you must interview more and conduct interview reviews; in addition, you must manage expectations well. You can look at opportunities before the Chinese New Year and use interviews as practice to truly develop your skills. Focus on the peak recruitment season from February to April next year. "After all, at this time at the end of the year, the number of positions is not large, and the quality is not high. It is better to prepare first. When the time comes, seize the opportunity accurately and succeed in one fell swoop."

[denimbex1986]

'WHO WAS J. Robert Oppenheimer? This is easy enough to answer: an American theoretical physicist, the “father of the atomic bomb,” an important architect of early US nuclear policy, and, ultimately, a victim of anti-communist fervor after he lost his security clearance in a well-publicized decision by the Atomic Energy Commission in 1954 and was excommunicated from the nuclear priesthood. Oppenheimer’s very public rise and fall, and his embodiment of various parables about dangerous knowledge (Faust, Prometheus, Icarus, etc.), have made his life one of the most scrutinized and publicized in the history of modern science. And yet, he is still universally described as inscrutable despite an extraordinary wealth of documentation: a voluminous FBI file; a security hearing that picked over his life with a microscope; and an archive of letters, memos, and recollections of both friends and enemies.

Some of Oppenheimer’s affect was clearly deliberate—he consciously played the role of a worldly, “brilliant” intellectual with broad-ranging interests and a rapid-firing mind. His close friend, the physicist I. I. Rabi, later told physicist and historian Jeremy Bernstein that “[Oppenheimer] lived a charade, and you went along with it.” The interest in Hindu philosophy and scripture, the Sanskrit, the cowboy-rancher, the poet, the flirtations with communism, the reading of Das Kapital in the original German—this was “Oppie,” a character invented by an insecure young man in the 1920s who struggled to be taken seriously by the luminaries he admired, and who felt a deep need to leave behind his cushy German Jewish upbringing on the Upper West Side.

That Oppenheimer himself played a role makes it especially fitting that his life has been adapted not only into a dozen or so full-length biographies but also in far more general histories of the atomic bomb and many prominent fictional portrayals in film, television, graphic novels, and one opera. (The best study of Oppenheimer’s use as a narrative figure is David K. Hecht’s 2015 book Storytelling and Science: Rewriting Oppenheimer in the Nuclear Age.) And while he has been subjected to the Hollywood treatment several times before, he has perhaps never been granted as much artistic treatment, nor quite such an enormous filming budget, as he has this summer with the debut of Oppenheimer, the latest film by Christopher Nolan.

Nolan wrote, directed, and produced Oppenheimer, explicitly basing it largely on the Pulitzer Prize–winning biography American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (2005), written by Kai Bird and the late historian Martin J. Sherwin. Nolan clearly fell into the Oppenheimer rabbit hole and, one can surmise, became captivated by the challenge of how to represent his paradoxical mind. What has resulted from that fascination is plainly a labor of love, both for Nolan and his leading actor, Cillian Murphy. According to Nolan’s promotional interviews, the script was written exclusively in the first person—from Oppenheimer’s perspective—a remarkable and telling revelation about the questions Nolan was pursuing. The film is fast-paced, with short, quick-cut scenes that proceed out of chronological order over a very long running time; a sense of anxious dread hangs over the entire affair. Oppenheimer is not easy to watch, and the large number of A- and B-list actors playing small roles (as historical figures both famous and obscure) is distracting and, at times, confusing, even for someone who knows the historical source material.

And yet, improbably, the film has become a summer blockbuster: within a few weeks, it reportedly earned several multiples of its purported $100 million price tag. As Variety put it, “considering ‘Oppenheimer’ is a three-hour, R-rated biographical drama, these numbers are staggering.” Much of this can be credited to Nolan, almost universally acknowledged as the premier director working at the intersection between think piece and spectacle.

When I learned that Nolan was making an Oppenheimer film, the first question that came to mind was: why? None of Nolan’s other films suggested an interest in historical biography, and if anything, the most frequent critique of Nolan is his indifference to deep characterization. Since I have been thinking about J. Robert Oppenheimer for some 20 years, I can certainly understand his allure, but to Nolan? I worried that Oppenheimer’s inner complexity and subtlety, the very thing that historians find interesting about him, would be turned into a simplistic parody (the brilliant scientist, the weeping martyr, the weapons maker, etc.).

And so, upon watching the film, I was impressed by how much Nolan as writer, and Murphy as actor, tried to avoid this particular snare. Murphy’s Oppenheimer exudes tension, intelligence, and, crucially, insecurity. He is not portrayed as a hero, or someone you would want to emulate, or potentially even someone you would like to have dinner with. He is smart, yes, but he’s also a show-off, a know-it-all whose need to be considered “brilliant” by others drives him at times to be impressive, cruel, and thoughtless. It is remarkable that Nolan and Murphy went in this direction. One gets the sense that Nolan thinks Oppenheimer is important, and interesting, but not that he likes Oppenheimer. This may have helped him avoid the most seductive trap of all: trying to make Oppenheimer a relatable everyman.

The film zigs and zags temporally, using Oppenheimer’s 1954 security clearance hearing as an organizer of sorts, jumping between 1954 and various moments from Oppenheimer’s earlier life. There is also some footage, always in black-and-white to distinguish it from Oppenheimer’s point of view, that follows the perspective of Lewis Strauss (played with verve by Robert Downey Jr.), Oppenheimer’s political enemy and the architect of his security clearance revocation. A few periods in Oppenheimer’s life receive particular focus: his early years as a student in Cambridge (ca. 1925), his years as a young professor at the University of California, Berkeley (1930s), the years he worked on the Manhattan Project (1942–45), the detection of the Soviet atomic bomb and the debate over the hydrogen bomb (1949–50), and the turn in political fortunes that led to his security clearance hearing and revocation (1953–54). Though this leaves out some key periods in his biography (more on that in a moment), it still feels like a lot to cover in a single film—too much, perhaps.

As a historian of nuclear weapons, I have been asked innumerable times since the film came out whether it was accurate. It is a harder question to answer than one might think. At some level, the answer is “of course not”—but that is true of not only all historical films but also, to a certain degree, all historical books. “Truth” is a tricky thing in general, and “historical truth” even trickier; scholars are always finding fault with each other’s works, and there is never any real consensus on the true character of a historical figure even for people with less apparent depth than Oppenheimer. And then there’s the fact that the standard for works of art is surely different. In Oppenheimer, many of the characters’ lines are in fact taken from historical documents, sometimes verbatim. When David Krumholtz delivers Rabi’s famous line about being appreciative of Oppenheimer’s contributions (“and what more do you want, mermaids?”), he uses an unusually verbatim quote, including a section (“and a whole series of Super bombs”) that was redacted until 2015, and is not present in any Oppenheimer biography that I know of.

The film also contains tricky mixtures of real and wholly imagined dialogue. In his testimony at Oppenheimer’s hearing, General Leslie Groves (Matt Damon), the military head of the Manhattan Project, concedes that, had he been acting according to the standards of the postwar Atomic Energy Act during World War II, he would not have given Oppenheimer a security clearance. This is indeed in the transcript of the security hearing. But in the film, Groves shoots off one more line, to the effect that he wouldn’t have cleared any of the scientists by that standard. It’s a good line—but the real Groves never said it, nor did he imply it in his actual testimony. Though supportive of Oppenheimer, he was also shielding himself from his own political and legal vulnerabilities. But the sentiment is right for the film, serving as an indication that Groves bore Oppenheimer no ill feeling, and that the priorities and requirements of World War II were different from those of the Cold War.

More troublesome are the aspects of the film that are based on untrustworthy historical accounts. A terrific scene, which takes place just after Hiroshima, shows Oppenheimer giving a rousing and patriotic speech to a bloodthirsty crowd while internally haunted by thoughts of the burned and dead. It is the one place where Oppenheimer’s conflicting feelings toward Hiroshima are portrayed, and where what had happened at Hiroshima is imagined.

The scene is powerful and appropriately disturbing. You could hear a pin drop during this scene in the sold-out theater I attended. But did this particular speech actually happen? It was not invented whole cloth by Nolan; the setup and dialogue were taken from a scientist’s recollections. But the scientist in question, Samuel Cohen, is the only person who has ever indicated that this event happened, and he only wrote it down many decades after the fact. (In his self-published memoir, Cohen insinuates that “[t]here’s an explanation” for the fact that nobody has ever written about this other than himself, but that he couldn’t be bothered to write about it.) Cohen was a bit of a fabulist; he created an identity for himself as the “father of the neutron bomb” based on work he did on the possibilities of enhanced-radiation warheads at the RAND Corporation in the late 1950s, which actual weapons designers from the period regarded as fairly insignificant. He was also no fan of Oppenheimer’s, considering him “a real sadist.” I do not put much stock in Cohen’s story.

But one can see the appeal of such a scene for Nolan: no other accounts have Oppenheimer giving any such speech after Hiroshima, or doing anything other than perhaps going to one party and then leaving. The literal or hewing-to-the-facts approach would be anticlimactic—whereas incorporating Cohen’s account allows for a complex exploration of the American reaction to Hiroshima, the Los Alamos reaction to Hiroshima, and Oppenheimer’s reaction to Hiroshima. It gives Nolan and Murphy a broader canvas to work with. Is there a greater truth being expressed, whatever the quality of the source? I am not sure. It depends on what one believes about Oppenheimer’s mental state immediately after Hiroshima, before the accounts of casualties and suffering came in, before Nagasaki, and before he was enlisted to (erroneously, it turns out) deny Japanese reports of radiation sickness. (Michael D. Gordin’s 2007 book Five Days in August: How World War II Became a Nuclear War is a close account emphasizing just how rapidly attitudes on the atomic bomb changed in the days between its first use and the eventual surrender of Japan.)

Another example of Hollywood invention occurs when Nolan has Oppenheimer meet President Harry Truman, and the president calls Oppenheimer a “crybaby” for complaining about having blood on his hands. What is the source of these insults? The “crybaby” and “blood” bits come from later stories told by Truman, when he was trying to impress upon others how impractical and irritating scientists can be, and how it was he, Harry Truman, who truly had blood on his hands (Truman had his own complex relationship to the bombings, despite his tough talk). There is also an account from biographer Nuel Pharr Davis of Oppenheimer’s side of that story, but Davis provides no citation whatsoever, nor even a date when this conversation may have taken place.

Nolan also interpolates into this meeting a line in which Oppenheimer suggests that the future of Los Alamos should be to “give it back to the Indians.” Not only is this unlikely to be a true line—a sentiment to the contrary is more likely—but also the only person who might have suggested that Oppenheimer said this was Edward Teller (another Oppenheimer enemy), and only in 1950 as part of an explicit attempt to recruit opposition to Oppenheimer and lobby for Teller’s own weapons laboratory (which would eventually become Livermore). As the late Oppenheimer biographer Priscilla McMillan pointed out, “Give It Back to the Indians” was a popular show tune from 1939, and if Oppenheimer ever did say the phrase, it was probably in jest, and certainly not to the president. (My wife has suggested that this would be like hearing someone describe themselves as a “Gangster of Love” and interpreting it as a literal assertion, rather than a tongue-in-cheek reference to the Steve Miller Band.) In Teller’s actual testimony at Oppenheimer’s security hearing, Teller distanced himself from the line, claiming that he heard it “attributed to Oppenheimer” but could not recall ever hearing him say it.

The film is full of such questionably accurate scenes. Did Oppenheimer actually try to poison his tutor at Cambridge with a poisoned apple? We don’t really know. Young Oppenheimer, as reflected through his letters of the period, was prone to making exaggerated, “shocking” statements of this sort. (Many of Oppenheimer’s letters from the 1920s contain what Jeremy Bernstein refers to as “Oppenheimer exuberance.”) It makes for a more perplexing character portrait to imagine these moments as literal, as Nolan does in the film, which raises this question: is representing them as literal truth getting at a deeper truth, or introducing a deeper confusion? Does the ambivalence of historians about an event give the artist full latitude to present it either way?

The most shocking (and creative) reappropriation is the famous line from the Bhagavad Gītā that Oppenheimer later claimed flashed into his mind during the world’s first nuclear test, Trinity: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” The actual line is an idiosyncratic translation, deployed as a near incomprehensible (and perhaps pretentiously “Oppie”) analogy about duty and awe. Disregarding whatever the real Oppenheimer might have meant by it, Nolan’s film turns the quote into an orgasm, or a memory of an orgasm. There is something about this kind of transformation that I respect more than the subtler ones.

Nolan is most editorial when he invents lines about Oppenheimer’s motivations and mental state and puts them into the mouths of observers: Haakon Chevalier (Jefferson Hall) suggests that Oppenheimer’s difficulties as a parent (and perhaps as a person) might be the result of staring into the infinite void of the universe for too long; Kitty Oppenheimer suggests that her husband’s need for the security hearing is a form of penance for his guilt about Hiroshima (an interesting thesis, one he surely would not have agreed with, but who knows?); Strauss suggests that Oppenheimer would like the world to remember him for Trinity, not Hiroshima (also interesting, although putting interesting sentiments into the mouth of a sworn enemy and unreliable narrator tends to dilute their credibility). I might not agree with these interpolations, but I respect that they are not superficial “theses” about Oppenheimer. That Murphy’s character does not endorse or deny any of them is, I think, a plus: the film suggests them as possible interpretations but does not collapse the uncertainty into one definitive reality.

Nolan’s film is most directly misleading about actual history when Oppenheimer is portrayed as getting sidelined, starting at the end of the Los Alamos sequence when it is suggested that, despite his usefulness to the military and the government, they are only interested in Oppenheimer’s technical abilities and not in his advice on other matters. It is further implied that in the film’s postwar period, Oppenheimer becomes marginalized, in part because Strauss is the sort of person who actually controls policy. This is wrong on several levels. Oppenheimer was much closer to the policy process during World War II than the film depicts, including in the targeting of the atomic bombs (and not just from a technical perspective). The film’s implication of distance between Oppenheimer and the government officials involved in dropping the atomic bomb is inaccurate; they all saw eye to eye, and Oppenheimer personally endorsed the idea that the bombs ought be dropped on “urban areas” without warning. He even suggested, after the Trinity test, ways in which the bomb designs could be modified to use more of their scarce nuclear fuel, so that there would be many more bombs ready to drop on Japan (Groves rejected this suggestion for the first bombs). Many years later, well after Oppenheimer had died, Strauss told an interviewer that these scientists during World War II felt a “compulsion to use the bomb—an obsession,” and while one should be wary of the source, in this case I think he was right.

In truth, Oppenheimer enjoyed tremendous influence in the atomic energy establishment after World War II. The chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission for its first, formative years was not Strauss but David Lilienthal, a liberal New Dealer who considered himself a close friend of Oppenheimer’s and a political ally. Oppenheimer’s views did not always carry the day, but one cannot really describe him as sidelined until Eisenhower became president in 1953, and then only because Strauss was made AEC chairman (Strauss’s anti-Oppenheimer campaign, whatever its deep motivations, began in earnest when he feared that Eisenhower would be charmed by Oppenheimer’s way of thinking). One can see how this makes a less clean narrative about Oppenheimer and early nuclear policy, and one can see as well why Nolan probably felt that jumping from 1945 to 1949 worked better for an already long film.

There are other areas where the film’s limited bandwidth creates distortion. The reactions to both the first Soviet atomic test and the hydrogen bomb debate feel rushed and devoid of stakes. One does not get a sense of what the H-bomb debate was about, or why people who supported building the atomic bombs would find the H-bombs morally objectionable. The brief section that addresses the plans for using the atomic bombs in Japan reinforces narratives that historians have for decades known to be false (like the idea that it was seen as a question of “bomb or invade”—in reality, these were not considered alternative options, and it was not at all clear that one, two, or even more atomic bombs would end the war). (Groves told Oppenheimer after Trinity, for example, “It is necessary to drop the first Little Boy and the first Fat Man and probably a second one in accordance with our original plans. It may be that as many as three [Fat Man bombs] may have to be dropped to conform to planned strategical operations,” along with the Little Boy bomb.) One gets the sense that these are not the kinds of historical questions that Nolan cares about.

So what does the director care about? Why make a film about Oppenheimer at all? Cold War narratives about Oppenheimer tend to be moralizing parables about the dangers of McCarthyism and the security state. This is not Nolan’s interest; to his credit, he makes it very clear that though the Oppenheimer hearings were a farce as far as justice was concerned, once the scientist’s behavior was under the microscope, it became hard for anyone, including Oppenheimer, to justify it. Oppenheimer might have gotten to his precarious position because he offended a few powerful people, and because he opposed them on the question of thermonuclear weapons, but his fate was sealed by his admission that he had lied repeatedly to security officers and had maintained connections—even sexual ones—with known or suspected communists after becoming the head of Los Alamos. One doesn’t leave Nolan’s film concerned that Oppenheimer didn’t get justice.

Nolan’s interest in Oppenheimer centers on two themes. One of them is the complexity of Oppenheimer’s character. The other is global destruction, threaded through the entire film from its first images until its last scene. The fact that these two themes are intertwined in the same person is, I think, the point. In Oppenheimer, the intensely personal is suffused with the apocalyptic imagination. The visions that kept Oppenheimer up at night were not about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for better or worse. They were about the next war, the one he hoped Hiroshima and Nagasaki would make impossible.

When Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace met Oppenheimer a few months after the end of World War II, he described a man in great distress. “I never saw a man in such an extremely nervous state as Oppenheimer,” Wallace wrote in his diary. “He seemed to feel that the destruction of the entire human race was imminent. […] The guilt consciousness of the atomic bomb scientists is one of the most astounding things I have ever seen.” (The result of this meeting was Wallace’s arranging of Oppenheimer’s disastrous encounter with Truman in the Oval Office.) Oppenheimer was, at this point, desperately trying to advocate for a world in which no nation would have nuclear weapons, using the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the nascent plans for even worse weapons, as an impetus for remaking the entire nature of war and international relations. He did not succeed; we live in his worst nightmare, where multiple states have civilization-killing quantities of nuclear arms ready for deployment at a moment’s notice.

This harried, eschatological prophet, desperately trying to invoke what influence he has in order to convince the people with real power not to use that power poorly, is the Oppenheimer that Murphy channels, and that Nolan is interested in. I have always thought that Prometheus was the wrong reference point, one that Oppenheimer himself would have strongly rejected. Oppenheimer was no champion of humanity, and his punishment was not for having “stolen fire,” but for more mundane transgressions, including those of the flesh, a fact that Nolan’s film emphasizes. In his Bhagavad Gītā reference, Oppenheimer renders himself as Prince Arjuna, who was cajoled by something great and terrible into taking on a burden he did not want. Even that feels incomplete, for while Oppenheimer was initially willing to go to war, he was afterwards gripped with an intense desire to push things in a different direction. Perhaps we need to invent a new, modern mythology for such a figure; perhaps that is what Nolan is really trying to do. Let’s hope the film will be remembered for this, and not just for its curious juxtaposition with the other summer blockbuster, Greta Gerwig’s (excellent) Barbie.'

[clarklovescarole]

September 1936: A Busy Month

Sept. 1, 1936: Couples of fans’ dreams

Will super-masculine Clark Gable marry super-feminine Mae West? 

Probably not, but you’d be surprised how many movie fans think it would be a swell idea. 

Kibitzing the motion picture marriage market is apparently the favorite indoor sport of t those who take film players seriously enough to write letters to and about them. Several hundred during the past month have urged Mae to flee altar-ward with the virile Gable, and vice versa…. 

Fans are often ignorant of actors’ currently marital ties or blithely disregard them. 

William Powell’s followers apparently won’t rest until he marries Jean Harlow, Mary Brian, Elizabeth Allan, Madge Evans, Steffi Duna, Joan Blondell, Tallulah Bankhead, or his ex-wife, Carole Lombard.

Sept. 1, 1936, retrieved from The San Bernadino County

Sept. 2, 1936: Honest Romance

The studios themselves serve as matchmakers for prominent young players and are quick to take advantage of the romances that spring up voluntarily. 

Jean Harlow and William Powell might have been teamed in “Libeled Lady” even if they were not so much interested in each other off the screen. But with the situation as it is, the picture is expected to have double appeal for the fans. 

Take Robert Taylor and Barbara Stanwyck! There’s a perfectly honest romance which was promptly capitalized on by casting the two in “His Brother’s Wife.” 

And Clark Gable and Carole Lombard: There’s no question about their mutual enchantment being of spontaneous origin, because they’re under contract to different studios. 

The strategists of each movie company exercise every precaution to promote and nurture romances between stars of their own constellations so that they can be put together in pictures and that publicity may not be shared with rival concerns.

Sept. 2, 1936; retrieved from Marshfield News Herald

Sept. 6, 1936 – The Daily Oklahoman

In addition, myriad rumors are linking in expected matrimony the names of Clark Gable and Carole Lombard, Robert Taylor-Barbara Stanwyck, Jean Harlow-William Powell, Loretta Young-Eddie Sutherland, Merle Oberon-David Niven, Ronald Colman-Benita Huma, and Eleanor Powell-Jimmy Stewart. 

It would be interesting to find out what the fans think of this wholesale renunciation of celibacy, whether they prefer their screen heroes and heroines married or single.

Sept. 7, 1936 – El Paso Herald 

Wife files answer to Clark Gable suit; Motion reveals no divorce action planned by couple 

Clark Gable and his estranged wife do not contemplate obtaining a divorce, Mrs. Gable disclosed today in her answer to the screen star’s suit for court interpretation of an informal property settlement. 

The Gables have been separated for more than a year.

Sept. 7, 1936 – The Mercury

Clark Gable and Carole Lombard glimpsed whispering this and that in a Hungarian lunchery…

Sept. 10, 1936 – The Morning Call

Clark Gable has sworn off bow ties, reportedly because Carole Lombard likes four-in-hands and presented him with dozens…

Sept. 12, 1936 – The Los Angeles Times 

(Sheilah Graham column) 

Two Stars Discover Their Temperaments Differ

Clark Gable and Carole Lombard have discovered their temperaments differ too widely to allow of friendship. 

Incidentally, most of Clark’s friends have remarked that since the separation from his second wife, he has been exceedingly morose and cynical. 

Sept. 15, 1936 – Stevens Point Journal

Friends of Miss Helene Knope of Stevens Point, who now is a special correspondent in Hollywood, will be interested in her interview with Clark Gable and her account of his diet, which she sent to the Stevens Point Journal. 

Her story is as follows: “Speaking of that Clark Gable-Carole Lombard romance, it seems to be in full swing…” 

Sept. 16, 1936 – The Salt Lake Tribune 

(Jimmy Fidler column)

I accept more seriously than most the rumors of an ultimate marriage of Carole Lombard and Clark Gable. 

This is why: In the first place, I think Carole is more than willing. In the second place, at a shooting range the other evening I asked Clark if he intends to marry again. “Sure,” he answered. “Why not? I’m normal.” 

“What sort of woman will your next wife be?” I persisted. 

He ceased firing, lowered the gunbutt from his shoulder, and said, “A woman who can make me laugh.” 

How well Carole Lombard fulfills the requirement!

Sept. 18, 1936: Actors’ habits

The next time you see Carole Lombard on the screen, notice whether she twirls a cigarette between her first two fingers and her thumb. 

Watch Clark Gable twist his neck in his collar, as if the collar were too tight. 

See whether Spencer Tracy wrinkles his forehead too much; he thinks he does. 

Every star has some idiosyncrasy in his screen mannerisms which he is constantly striving to correct and which he sees again and again as the picture is put on the screen. 

Sept. 18, 1936; Retrieved from Standard Sentinel

Sept. 19, 1936: Partner swap

“MY MAN GODFREY” – William Powell and Carole Lombard, who had wanted to play together in a picture when they were married to each other, finally got the opportunity now that they are divorced. Carole and Powell are very friendly and both enjoyed the association. 

Clark Gable often called for Miss Lombard after work, and William Powell would hurry to Miss Harlow. Strange indeed is the fact that Carole Lombard and Clark Gable appeared in a picture together, “No Man of Her Own.” Then Miss Lombard would leave the set to join her husband, William Powell. 

“My Man Godfrey” was written by Eric Hatch, from a short story by him, and the screen play was done in collaboration with Morrie Ryskind, who is the co-author of that Pulitzer prize play, “Of Thee I Sing.”

Sept. 19, 1936; retrieved from NY Daily News

Sept. 19, 1936 – The South Bend Tribune

Carole Lombard today joined the parade of actresses who have adopted their screen names legally. The blond star, whose real name is Jane Peters, is having her attorney draw up a court petition to have Carole Lombard made her legal name.

Sept. 20, 1936 – The Des Moines Register

The “Valentine Ford” which CAROLE LOMBARD gave CLARK GABLE as a joke has received so much publicity Gable has had it painted black so he can use it without paralyzing traffic.

Sept. 20, 1936: Company picnic

MGM Studio Employees Hold Picnic

It was picnic time in Hollywood when this picture was taken. Keeping ants off their hard-boiled eggs are Clark Gable and Carole Lombard. The party was given for several hundred employees and their families by the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios.

Sept. 20, 1936; Retrieved from The Los Angeles Times

Sept. 22, 1936 – Star Tribune

CAROLE LOMBARD is demanding a very substantial increase in salary, or she will not sign her new contract with Paramount…

Sept. 23, 1936 – The San Francisco Examiner 

PARAMOUNT is moving heaven and earth to borrow Clark Gable from MGM to costar with Carole Lombard in “Exclusive.” 

The studio heads feel that, due to their muchly publicized romance, the combination would ring the box office bell such as it did with Robert Taylor and Barbara Stanwyck in “My Brother’s Wife.”Paramount, by the bye, will probably soon be on a very large borrowing spree, along with all the other studios, since no less than twenty films are being held up at the moment because of a dearth of leading men. It seems like a pretty good time for freelancers. 

Getting back to Miss Lombard, her stock since “My Man Godfrey” has shot practically to the top of the ladder, since “Godfrey” has broken all existing box office records in Los Angeles and is starting out to repeat same in New York.

Sept. 24, 1936 – Pittsburgh Post Gazette

Clark Gable and Carole Lombard had more fun than anyone at the M-G-M picnic recently…

Sept. 26, 1936: Day at the Fair

MOVIE STARS ATTEND FAIR - The Chicago Tribune

Clark Gable and Carole Lombard, two of the reigning favorites of Hollywood, as they attended the Los Angeles county fair at Pomona, Cal.

Sept. 26, 1936 – Pittsburgh Post Gazette

That handsome couple at the Pomona Fair was none other than Clark Gable and Carole Lombard…

Sept. 26, 1936 – Detroit Free Press

Hollywood can get excited about the darndest things. Such as Carole Lombard riding around in  a certain car, of a certain type and paint job, which everyone “knew” belonged to Gary Cooper. And the Coopers are supposed to be so happily married, too. 

Well, it turned out that Carole was doing nothing of the sort. Said car was owned by Clark Gable, who has a perfect right to loan it to his friend. It happens to be an identical model of an automobile that Gary Cooper owns. But it stops right there, with the Coopers still very happily married. And Clark Gable and Carole Lombard still good friends.

Sept. 26, 1936 – The Los Angeles Times 

Two “Romances” Not Serious 

Sources close to all parties concerned say there is little likelihood that the current “romances” featuring Carole Lombard and Clark Gable, and Bill Powell and Jean Harlow, will end in the altar. None of them appears to be marriage minded at the current writing, although both twosomes find each other’s company enjoyable and go around together a lot. However, a woman has a right to change her mind – and a man, too, for that matter.

Sept. 29, 1936 – The Spokesman 

(Sheilah Graham column) 

Clark Gable and Carole Lombard decided to patch up their quarrel for the sake of the joint box they owned for last week’s Pacific southwest tennis tournament. 

Another interested observer at the matches was Mrs. Rhea Gable, who spent most of the time looking sadly at the husband from whom she is separated and his blond companion. 

Sept. 29, 1936 – The Miami News

Over the Teacups 

Carole Lombard, who temporarily lost her title as Hollywood’s most outspoken femme to Arlene Judge, has won it again, under the gentle tutelage of Clark Gable. Clark, in his better moments, can beat any longshoreman at his own game of verbal fireworks, say his friends. And no fish-wife that ever was (say her enemies) can hold a candle to Carole when it comes to verbombast. 

Sept. 29, 1936 – Honolulu Star 

The Clark Gable-Carole Lombard romance is not quite made to order for movieland’s purposes, Gable is an MGM player and Miss Lombard is at Paramount. Paramount has been trying to borrow Gable to team him in a picture with Carole and MGM has been trying to borrow Carole for the same purpose. These efforts having failed, both studios made the best of the situation by allowing a third studio, Universal, to use the two stars together in My Man Godfrey. (Note: Confused writer??)

Another stunt is to cast divorced couples together and to hint about possible reconciliations. This was done with William Powell and Carole Lombard and with Margaret Sullavan and Henry Fonda. No such reconciliations have, however, developed. 

[lovelytsunoda]

bath and body works // lando norris

summary: y/n can’t find a bottle of perfume. a quick call to lando reveals why. or, alternately, in which we realize that lando is an adorable little gremlin who brings his gf’s perfume with him so he doesn't feel lonely on race weekends.

its like nine in the morning

y/n has a job interview for her promotion, and she cant find the perfume she normally wears

its a bath and body works spray, and she has dozens of varying bath and body scents

but she needs that one

her usual one

looks in all of the bathroom cupboards

all the shelves in the walk in closet

but the bottle is just gone

she begins to wonder if lando accidentally packed it with his things before he left for singapore

not even caring about time zones, y/n reaches for her phone and gives lando a call

“hey, baby! don’t you have that interview today?” lando is all bright smiles, glasses perched on his nose, hair messy.

“it’s in an hour, but have you seen my good perfume? the one i always wear.”

“don’t you have an entire cupboard full of perfume?”

“yes but i need that one”

y/n catches the blush creeping across lando’s face, as well as her boyfriend’s reluctance to look at the camera

“babe. . . “

“okay, so i may have brought it with me to singapore”

“oh, did you grab it by accident when you were looking fro your cologne?”

“no, i grabbed it on purpose, actually.”

she gives him a very confused stare down the phone

“you did what?”

and then lando spills all

he brings y/n’s perfume with him on race weekends so that when he gets lonely- 

which is often

he can spray it in the room so that if he closes his eyes, he thinks y/n is there with him

he also sprays the bedsheets on her usual side of the bed, so the hotel starts to feel like home

all in all, its actually very sweet.

“i have it right here.” lando states, holding up the bottle of neon blue perfume

“lando, how much did you use? it’s like half empty!”

“uhhh....i plead the fifth?”

“you do realize im making you buy me a new one, right?” y/n says as she sprays a different perfume on her skin

“baby, i will buy you an entire set, lotion and all if it makes you happy.”

“good.” she grins. “i can’t wait until you come home, baby.”

“two more days, my love. two more days.”

“now don’t use any more of my perfume.”

[blueiscoool]

Sean Connery's own 'James Bond Car' Sells For $2.4 Million

A silver Aston Martin DB5 that had been owned by actor Sean Connery was sold at auction Thursday for $2.4 million.

It was a 1964 Aston Martin DB5, just the sort of car that British secret agent James Bond drove in the 1960s films in which he was played by Connery. The Bond character has been played by a number of actors and has driven many different cars in the more than two dozen films in the series. They've included everything from BMWs and Bentleys to Chevrolets and Fords. But the 1964 is still the best known "Bond car."

The one that Connery first drove in the 1964 film "Goldfinger" was an Aston Martin DB5 replete with gadgets like machine guns, an ejector seat and an oil slick maker. More than 50 years later, Connery purchased a 1964 DB5 for himself -- though it lacked the movie car's guns and gadgets -- in early 2018. Connery died almost two years later at the age of 90. It was only DB5 he ever actually owned.

At $2.4 million, which included fees to the auction company Broad Arrow, the car fetched more than originally projected. The company had expected it to sell for between $1.4 million and $1.8 million at its collector car auction in Monterey, California. The buyer was not named. The auction is one of a number of collector car sales during Monterey Car Week, an annual series of classic car events on California's Monterey Peninsula.

A 1964 Aston Martin DB5 in this car's pristine condition would typically be worth about $1 million, according to the classic car insurance and event company Hagerty, which recently took full ownership of Broad Arrow.

DB5s directly associated with James Bond films have sold for vastly more than that. A gadget-filled DB5 that was used to promote the film's original release sold for $6.4 million in 2019.

During his life, Connery had often told his children of his fond memories of driving the Aston Martin in films, his son Jason Connery said in an interview. When they were grown they suggested to their father that he buy one, but he was resistant to the idea.

"He'd say, 'I don't want to because it feels a bit obvious, you know, with me,'" Jason Connery said. "I said, 'But forget it, it's not about that.'" Barney Ruprecht, an Aston Martin specialist with Broad Arrow who had also consulted with Connery on making the purchase, advised Connery against getting a car in need of restoration since the work would probably take a couple of years, he said. Instead, he and Connery sought out a car that was in as near-perfect condition as possible. The car remains in very nearly that condition, according to Ruprecht, with only some creases in the seat leather as evidence it has been sat in.

Once Connery purchased the car, he had it repainted from black to Snow Shadow Gray, the color closest to that of the movie car.

But after that work was done, there was little time left to actually drive it.

"Unfortunately as he got older, traveling, especially to Europe [became difficult] and then COVID hit and...," said Jason Connery. "You know, unfortunately, he never really got to enjoy the car that he'd bought."

The car was kept by Connery at his home in Switzerland, according to Jason Connery. He was so fond of the car, he kept a photo of it on his desk.

A substantial portion of the proceeds from the sale will go to support the Connery Family Philanthropy Fund, according to the Broad Arrow Group. In addition to the car itself, the winning bidder will receive a ride in the car from the famous retired Formula 1 racing driver Jackie Stewart.

Stewart, like Connery, is from Scotland, and the two were longtime friends.

[obviouslygenuinely]

Babygate Analysis/Conclusions: A Non-Larry Perspective

(Image Credit: Hollywood Life)

I'm prefacing this post with a few disclaimers:

After some consideration, I chose to write this without factoring in Larry whatsoever. No Larry-related points, proof, or speculation in any way. This is solely analyzing babygate from an unbiased perspective. 

I don't claim to know the entire truth. It is impossible for any of us to know.  What I conclude is based on direct evidence, circumstantial evidence, research, and analysis.

I am willing to discuss opposing views. I’m happy to talk about the topic in a civil, kind, and mature matter. I will dismiss any discourse that is aggressive, immature, and so on.

I did not include every single opinion/conclusion/piece of evidence I found. I condensed my thoughts as much as possible (and this is still a novel-length post). There are so many more points I can think of. However, babygate masterposts cover all of that; I’ll link to some of those at the end.

The conclusion points aren't in a very specific order. I aimed to list related points one after another. Aside from that, it's not in order of "hardest to weakest" evidence.

Please read “Author’s Notes” for additional clarity/input. They interject thoughts/etc. that I feel are necessary to include. 

Lastly, I included links to every source I cited in this post. However, I did not tag the Tumblr users. I’m not sure if they are comfortable with having Babygate questions/comments directed to their blogs. If you are a linked source and want to be tagged, please let me know! 

My Initial Reaction To Babygate

In February of 2020, I received several messages on LateToLarry requesting that I analyze something called “babygate”. I had no idea what babygate meant at the time. 

I learned what it meant, and prior to any research I felt the theory was so absurd. I also felt uncomfortable analyzing it because I believed I’d feel bias as a single mom. The idea of discussing a random child in depth initially bothered me, too. I declined to analyze it last year.

However, I did a LOT of research over time. My opinion has changed significantly. Below, I’ve shared my main conclusions and analysis about babygate. Thank you for reading and I hope you enjoy my post! 

1. No Paternity Test Was Performed Prior To The Pregnancy Announcement

Louis was/is a prominent celebrity and has a current net worth of $70 million. From legal, financial, and practical standpoints, it makes no sense for him to choose not to get a test. 

It’s unheard of in Hollywood and the entertainment industry. Any sensible team -lawyers, PR reps, managers, advisors, etc. - would not just go along with it. They are employed to protect his career and image. 

The Opposing Views

A. “Briana/Louis didn’t want to risk miscarriage with prenatal testing.”

Non-invasive testing is completely safe for fetuses and pregnant women, so there’s no medical reason for the lack of testing.

B. “Louis chose not to get the test done because he wanted to be a father and was invested in the pregnancy/parenting.”

Time has shown that this is not true. Louis does not have custody; there was a brief custody case in 2016 that led nowhere. He does not have a consistent or prominent role in the child’s life.

Conclusion

There is no logical reason for the lack of paternity testing prior to the announcement unless Louis knew he was not the father and all parties knew this to be true.

2. There Was No Confirmation Of A Paternity Test After The Birth

I’ll keep this section fairly short. A quick Google search returns dozens of conflicting reports. Many of them state that Louis demanded a paternity test shortly after birth. Other reports state that he has never pursued a paternity test. 

Here are a few examples:

“Louis Tomlinson not interested in paternity test” - Business Standard

“EXCLUSIVE: Louis Tomlinson Demanded a DNA Test “As Soon as the Baby Was Born”” - InTouch Weekly

“Louis Tomlinson: No DNA Test Needed ... Positive Freddie's His Son” -TMZ

“Louis Tomlinson & Briana Jungwirth: WhyHe Had DNA Test Done on His Newborn Son” - Hollywood Life

This Twitter thread discusses TMZ reports that - as of 2020 - no DNA test was done.

Conclusion

There is no reliable confirmation that Louis pursued a paternity test. The media cannot come to a general/factual consensus.

Again, there is no reasonable explanation for the lack of paternity testing unless Louis knows he is not the father of the child. 

3. The Conception-To-Birth Timeline Is Inconsistent/Unreliable

Pregnancy and conception as a whole can be rather confusing; timelines from conception to birth are unique to each person. Having said that, Briana’s timeline is full of glaring inconsistencies that don’t add up. 

I’ll begin with this timeline based on bulletprooflarry’s post and my own research. Dates I’ve added myself include linked sources:

May 5th, 2015 - Louis and Briana were first seen together in public.

May 6th to May 31st, 2015 - Briana and her mom followed baby-related social medial accounts.

May 12th, 2015 - Louis and Briana were pictured together in public.

July 3rd, 2015 - Louis is seen with Briana’s brother in Hollywood.

July 14th, 2015 - The first pregnancy report is published.

August 4th, 2015 - Louis confirms pregnancy on GMA.

January 21st, 2016 - The child is reportedly born.

Based on the dates above, these are the possible dates/milestones for her pregnancy:

Scenario A - If conception occurred on May 5th, Briana was 37 weeks and 2 days pregnant on January 21st, 2016. This is considered an early-term birth and about 26% of births occur at 37 weeks.

Scenario B - If conception occurred on May 12th, Briana was 36 weeks and 2 days pregnant on January 21st. This is considered a late-term or late premature birth and about 10% of births occur at 36 weeks.

These dates matter because Briana’s alleged hospital stay was not consistent with a premature or early-term birth. She was pictured in public - healthy and holding a baby carrier - within one week of giving birth. 

(Image Credit: Daily Mail)

(Image Credit: larrysbbrbb28)

If she gave birth based on the dates above, it’s extremely unlikely that she or the baby would be out in public so soon.

Below are screenshots of an additional timeline from an archived Tumblr post. It provides excellent points about more timeline inconsistencies: 

The main inconsistencies and red flags are bolded in the post. It supports the unreliable conception timeline, and it also mentions my next point - the official pregnancy announcement. 

The post above mentions that the Jungwirth family followed baby-related accounts before Briana could possibly know she was pregnant. Here’s one screenshot from skepticallarrie proving it:

I’ve also seen several posts that show inconsistencies with the size of Briana’s baby bump. Unfortunately, the most reliable post no longer exists. You can view a web archive of Briana’s pregnancy photos, but most of the image links are broke. 

The only post I have saved is a web archive of a long babygate post. The beginning of the post contains photos showing discrepancies in the size of Briana’s baby bump. 

The Opposing Views

“Pregnancy looks different on everybody, everyone recovers differently, etc.”

Yes, this is true and a valid point! As a woman who has gone through multiple pregnancies and two live births, I truly understand this argument. 

However, the sheer amount of inconsistencies are what make this a red flag. There are too many unreliable and contradicting points to brush this off. It goes beyond the point of “well, each person has a different experience”.

Conclusion

There are a few conclusions/scenarios I believe you can draw from the information above:

Briana was pregnant prior to meeting Louis.

Briana was never pregnant in the first place. 

Both are valid to consider, but I personally believe she was never pregnant. 

(Author’s note: My calculation for dates are based on the date of alleged conception. Most due date calculators, by default, use the date of a woman’s last mentrual period - LMP - to provide estimations.

I also used Date Duration Calendar for my calculations. Accessible due date calculators only allowed me to input dates from 2019/2020. Depending on the tools and dates you use, your mileage may vary.)

4. The Announcement Itself Was Highly Unusual

This point ties into the first and third points. I don’t consider it a major piece of evidence, but it’s noteworthy due to the other points. 

So, there are a few reasons why the Good Morning America announcement stands out. 

A. If Briana got pregnant on May 5th, then she was approximately 10 weeks pregnant when the first pregnancy report was published. This also means she was approximately 13 weeks pregnant at the time of the GMA announcement.

If Briana got pregnant on May 12th, she was approximately nine weeks pregnant at the time of the first report and approximately 12 weeks pregnant at the time of the GMA announcement.

B. The public announcement on Good Morning America raises a lot of questions. I’ve had multiple issues embedding the video; the bolded link takes you to the GMA announcement on YouTube. 

Anyways, these questions/thoughts - disregarding any Larry theories -  come to mind when watching the video: 

This is a segment for promoting/discussing their album/music.

The baby announcement is the sole non-album/music related topic that is mentioned during the segment.

The announcement is not organically worked into the segment as a natural talking point.

Louis’ reactions - such as bringing the microphone to his lips and not talking - is very unlike his standard interview demeanor.

The male interviewer and the band members have noticeable facial expressions and body language that suggest discomfort, stress, or awkwardness. 

A post by skepticalarrie draws similar conclusions. Her post is much more detailed than mine, and I highly recommend reading/viewing it. 

(Author’s Note: I’ve touched upon this on LateToLarry and will make a post here eventually, but body language and facial expressions are valid. They’re valid to the point that they are used in court cases.) 

Conclusion

My conclusions here are twofold. One is that: 

Announcing a pregnancy - especially a celebrity-related pregnancy - this early is extremely uncommon and unlikely.

The announcement itself seems out of place and very forced. 

This particular point, to me, is not extremely strong evidence. I still think it’s worth keeping in mind and is relevant to other points here. So, I’ve included it either way.

5. Briana Posted Stolen Pregnancy/Baby Photos On Social Media

(EDIT: I wrote this piece before the recent release of Briana’s alleged ultrasound and don’t have time to add it. It’s pretty strong proof and can easily be found in recent babygate posts.)

Babygate posts often point out that Briana and the Jungwirth family used stolen/fake pregnancy and baby photos on social media. It’s a well-known topic that’s often discussed. 

I’m condensing this section to a few examples. I encourage additional research if you’d like to see more. 

A. This Tumblr post shows stolen baby bump photos that Briana’s cousin Ashley posted on Twitter: 

B. This Tumblr post and Twitter post show a stolen baby photo that Briana posted on Instagram:

(Author’s Note: Since I was not active in the fandom at the time, I am relying on information from other blogs and social media posts. I vetted my sources pretty well, but any false information is my own mistake.)

Conclusions

The only word that sums this up is “suspicious”. Using stolen photos of a pregnant woman/baby is not necessary if you are legitimately pregnant. That’s really what it boils down to. It lends to the conclusion that Briana was never pregnant. 

6. Photos And Videos Of The Child Are Heavily Altered And Manipulated

It is indisputable that many photos and videos of the child are heavily manipulated to alter his appearance. This goes beyond filters, lighting, and angles. 

Several detailed posts show the manipulations; here are some examples:

A web archive of all Photoshop evidence from tellmethisisnotlove

An in-depth post from genuineconspiracy that includes detailed photo evidence.

A video post from freefreddiereign that shows Photoshop evidence based on photos the child. 

There is no doubt that his facial features are frequently altered. This is easy to conclude using any free software that detects Photoshop. As a photographer myself, I can easily spot the manipulations.

(Author’s Note: I know that directly discussing the child is controversial. When I first heard of babygate, my initial reaction was discomfort about analyzing a child.

I quickly learned/concluded that his family members are responsible for heavily putting him in the public eye. All content I’ve used for research is based on the family’s posts.

Still, I have personally chosen not post pictures of the child, but the links I am sharing contain photos/videos of him.

Additionally, I used FotoForensics on photos of myself prior to writing this. It was important to me to feel absolutely certain about this point. I’m fine with sharing my own FotoForensics images if anyone is curious.)

The Opposing Views

A. “Freddie looks like Louis in pictures that aren’t Photoshopped.”

Parentage cannot be based on whether or not a child looks like his mother/father. I understand the viewpoint, but it’s simply not evidence. Additionally, thinking the child looks like Louis is a matter of opinion. 

There’s also the fact that appearance means nothing overall. Science backs up this statement very well. Examples and references:

“How can children from the same parents look so different?” by HowStuffWorks

“My Baby Looks Nothing Like Me: A Genetic Explanation” by FamilyEducation

Additionally, here is a personal anecdote. I have two sons close to Freddie’s age. One of them looks exactly like his father and nothing like me. The other looks exactly like me and nothing like his father. Despite how they look, they are both of them are our biological children. 

Conclusion

There is no reasonable explanation for altering the child’s appearance - particularly to make him look more similar to Louis. 

I cannot think of a single argument as to why the Jungwirth family would do this unless they need/want the child to look a specific way. 

7. Johannah Deakin’s Official Obituary Does Not Mention The Child

When looking into babygate, I read the argument that the child is legitimately Louis’ son because he is listed as her grandchild in Internet-based obituaries and announcements. 

I also read the counter-argument that Louis’ mother’s official newspaper/print obituary does not mention the child.  I recall seeing proof, but I did not save it at the time. I did some research and this appears to be true. 

The Doncaster Free Press is a local weekly newspaper in Doncaster, and it published an article about the funeral. The article is NOT an obituary itself, but it does list her obituary details. The publication does not list the child among the surviving family members. 

If a mistake is made regarding these details, it’s typical for newspapers to post a correction addressing a misprint. Upon further research, the Doncaster Free Press did not issue a correction at any time. 

(Author’s Note: I lost my own mother and am personally familiar with how local obituaries are written. Immediate family members - i.e. spouses and adult children - provide information regarding surviving family members.) 

Conclusion

The conclusion here is straightforward. Louis and his family chose not to include the child in his mother’s official obituary. This strongly suggests that he is not legitimately related to Louis. 

My Opinion-Based Conclusions

Update: After some consideration, I am saving my opinion-based conclusions for a separate post. I originally intended to include them here; transparency is important to me.

Unfortunately, the section became rather long and took away from the main post points. So, I’ll be working on a post that’s just my opinion-based conclusions. In the meantime, feel free to message me with any questions. 

Final Thoughts

If you’ve made it this far, thank you for taking the time to read my post! I appreciate the interest expressed for it, and I hope it lives up to expectations. 

Again, I want to reiterate this is:

Not an all-inclusive post; I narrowed down my findings to seven points.

Not a masterpost on babygate.

Purposely omitting any potential Larry-related points to remove bias. 

I’ve reread this quite a few times, and it’s as error-free as possible. If you spot any mistakes/errors, I’m completely open to making corrections. Just kindly let me know. 

This list contains references/research about babygate that I consider the most reliable. It includes Larry and non-Larry related Babygate content.

Tumblr posts tagged with babygate by Tumblr use genuineconspiracy.

A web archive of babygate posts by Tumblr user tellmethisisnotlove (her account was deactivated by staff).

Tumblr posts tagged with babygate by darkrainbowlouis.

Tumblr posts tagged with babygate by skepticalarrie.

Lastly, if there’s interest in an opinion-related post or Larry-related post, I’ll consider writing them. Feel free to let me know as you all did with this post. 

Thanks!

Amy (obviouslygenuinely/latetolarry)

[1ddiscourseoftheday]

Wed 7 Apr ‘21

Louis left Tulum and went to Mexico City, and we got airport pics from both ends: the gathered fans were told by his bodyguard that they should keep their distance but that yes, pictures would be allowed. Thank you Louis! We got to see him a little for the first time in so long, in videos of him walking by (and getting ready to walk by) and blurry pics of him with his guitar, and Oli and Charlie- I’m excited to someday see the footage of whatever they’re working on. But for now, finally some proper pictures of the long long hair, or at least the below the hat part, all flippy and like...LONG! It’s on his SHOULDERS! Early pics had some interesting shadows around an elbow, prompting a flurry of NeW TaTtoO?? excitement, but when more pics were posted we could see that no, his elbow remains the same, false alarm. Once that tattoo kerfuffle died down the interest refocused on his shirt, which featured- a whole damn pile of skulls!

Louis went through a long phase of wearing skull shirts a while back, and the fact that it was during a period of a lot of very pointed t-shirt messages (and that he kept doing it more than ever despite knowing what we were reading into it) seemed to reinforce the theory that he did in fact mean things by it, and seeing him say yes to fan photos while wearing this shirt for the occasion… well! WELCOME BACK public Louis, we MISSED YOU! Yesterday’s shirt was for the band Obituary- is the band name a nod at the fact that Syco, generally considered to be the main target of previous skull shirts, is now dead and gone (rest in pieces assholes:))? Is Louis drawing attention to the livestream that band did a few days ago for their album ‘The End Complete’, and if so, is that also about Syco or about… something else? Inconclusive, but if we were meant to find their song “End It Now”, that can truly only be about one thing!! Am I to believe that SBB himself, Mr “I like to draw the fans’ attention to the lyrics of things” just, whoopsy, missed that! I mean, you would think every band on earth has lyrics about “ending it“ with the number of times he’s made that mistake, damn… he just never learns. Poor Louis, gosh how embarrassing! Lol. Anyway, I’ve seen people wondering lately what will happen when all the fans that have joined us in this time of lockdown and of no real contact with Louis will react when their version of Louis has to compete with the real one- and him barely being back at all but immediately reminding people that he is not a dad FFS feels like an excellent beginning, this should be good! BUCKLE IN friends! The real Louis is sooo much more fun than the boring made up one, just get ready to enjoy the chaotic energy and trying to keep up with him….

Oh also Louis liked a Snuts tweet about being underdogs as they fight to get the release week UK #1 for their new album, and a charity says they reached out to Louis AND LOTTIE to play in their celeb footie match PLEASE, HOW CUTE WOULD THAT BE? Come on Tomlinsons, say yes!

Liam has a big interview in Glamour to promote his BAFTAS performance! If *I* were doing the piece I would have really gone hard on the Two Liams angle of the performance (in which Liam will be accompanied by a hologram of himself) but alas they are boring and only interviewed one of him- maybe the part where he says “you're on stage, you're a certain type of person, and at home you're a certain type of person” sort of counts? The “that's always something I've really struggled with” makes it not so fun though, but that’s a Liam interview for ya; worrisome and makes you want to hug him a lot. “I didn't actually realize this for a long time, but I often give a little bit too much away,“ he says, and today is no exception. We catch up on the time since last we heard from him, when he told us he was going to take some well-earned time off and try to focus on writing new music; he continues to have difficulty with downtime unfortunately. Oh Liam, I do wish it were easier for you to take a break! He says, “I stopped working and I had a full, proper month off [and that was] really hard. And it was all a bit dark for me for a little bit... not being able to go anywhere, not being able to do anything. It really, really hit home. And I just found myself sat in the same place day in, day out. And I was like, okay, I really do not know what to do with myself” and “for me, learning to relax has always been quite a hard thing to do because I feel like if I'm not moving forward, then I must be going backwards.” He goes on to say “so, in a way it's kind of a blessing in disguise, as this has all kind of taught me to relax a little bit more. And to not be so worried about that, like the world is not going to fall over if I don't do something today,” and I wish I believed him, but that’s Liam’s way, to be like oh I need to add something upbeat and end on a cheerful note! So IDK. He also talks about drinking too much, at the beginning of lockdown especially, and how he’s dealt with it by getting back to working out and dieting. There’s nothing there that he hasn’t talked about before (he’s publicly addressed both his struggles with alcohol dependency and has talked a lot about his disordered eating though he hasn’t himself named it that) but after publication Glamour edited the piece to omit the part about his drinking-- I’m guessing the augmented reality app people didn’t feel it fit their ideal image (sigh). What that leaves is him saying how nice it was to be able to eat what he wanted during lockdown but that having the boundaries and rules in place of restricting his food again has made him feel better about himself, which if you ask me is still plenty distressing. Oh Liam :( <I’ve never wanted to hug someone so bad/ Spongebob meme> On a slightly more cheerful note, he tells us he feels supported and heard by a manager that he’s close to, and by Louis, and that those relationships are good for him (the interviewer does ask about Bear, but financee Maya is not mentioned even once in this article). The piece ends with a startling response to a comment about his upcoming performance: “I'll see you wherever you want me in your house, I guess.”

Niall posted about his Masters (golf) fantasy league and he was seen out and about! He was photographed in London driving a car the size of a house and on the street carrying one of his dozens of different reusable water bottles, with his hair floppy and down- is it a new haircut or just unstyled??- and shorts and little roundish shades. Hello Neil! There was a rumored sighting of Harry in London as well but no pics and like we know he’s there anyway so… shrug. And iHeart award nominations are up, and they’re pitting louies against harries, ouch. Will it be nasty (well when isn’t it even without this voted category, sigh), or will the louies simply steamroller everyone as per usual? Only time will tell, but if so harries can console themselves with their likely wins in the Male Artist of the Year, Best Lyrics (Adore You), and Song of the Year (WS) categories.

[writingdotcoffee]

#193: Overnight Success... 10 Years in the Making

Success fascinates people. Rapid success attracts the most attention. A new author appears, seemingly out of nowhere. It gives people hope that if it happened for someone else, it can happen for them too. The subjects of these overnight success stories quickly push back: 'Hang on a minute. I've been writing stories for 10 years. This was no overnight success!'

But what do those 10 years actually look like?

The Early Days

When you first start writing, it's exciting. Everything is new. You're blissfully unaware of how many things you don't know yet. As the initial excitement wears off, you still have an excuse for almost anything — I'm new. I'm just starting out. I will get better over time.

A Few Years In

Time goes by, and you're well aware of the challenge ahead of you. You keep working, but you don't really have much to show for yourself yet. Nothing you'd be proud of.

At this point, you start questioning whether you have any talent for this at all. Maybe you should just do something else instead?

This is where most people give up.

Several Years In

Things get grimmer from there. As you get more years under your belt, you start feeling like a failure. How come you've been writing for five, six, seven years and nobody still wants to read your shit?

You can't go through this phase without genuine passion for the work that you do. That's what keeps you writing when there is no hope left that the whole thing will ever lead to anything.

Just Before Success

You'd've thought that things would pick up from here a little bit, but it gets even worse. You've been writing for 10 years by this point. Where's the money? Where are the worldwide book tours? The TV interviews? The glowing reviews?

You're in your late 20s or early 30s. You have the same crappy job that you had 10 years ago because you pour all your energy into writing instead of climbing the corporate ladder.

It's tough seeing your friends who chose more stable careers getting promotions and buying houses while you're getting dozens and dozens of rejections. You have absolutely no idea whether all your hard work will ever pay off. It might. It might not.

Then It Happens

Then one day, you get a full manuscript request. Three weeks later, you're flying to NYC to sign with an agent. A year on, you're holding a hardback in your hand with a blurb from Neil Gaiman and "No.1 New York Time Bestseller" in your Twitter bio.

An interviewer asks you how it feels seeing so much success so quickly. You take a deep breath and politely explain that you've been writing for the past 10 years.

Success Isn't Linear

There's no clear path to success as a writer. For the most part, you're feeling like a failure. You're trying different things. Nothing seems to work. Until it does.

The best way to find success is to love what you're creating so much that you'd keep doing it as if you had no chance to succeed at all.

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Past Editions

#192: Why Write?, April 2021

#191: The Best Writing Quotes From the Past Year, April 2021

#190: Writing and Snow, April 2021

#189: The Importance of Showing Up, April 2021

#188: The Casual Writer, March 2021

[margarethx]

I really don’t like going into topics like that, because I honestly care more about characters than actors who play them most of the time... I don’t feel like it’s my job to defend celebrities and actors, because I don’t owe them anything and I don’t know them, so I might be wrong... But the way some of you act about the whole situation with Anthony Mackie is abhorrent and I just can’t fully ignore it. So let’s sum it up.

----- ------- -----

1) Majority of the people who criticize Anthony for his words did not learn the full context. I just know they didn’t. They didn’t click to see the entire interview and analyze what was really said. They just saw a headline with some “scandalous” statement and started ranting about it without thinking.

2) Most of the fans who are the most loud and vicious about their criticism of Anthony Mackie in this situation sound like they would hate him no matter what he said. They were just waiting for him to do something wrong or semi-wrong and lached onto it the first chance they got.

3) It’s frankly embarassing that after 6 episodes of a popular Marvel show, dozens of media appearences, and hundreds of positive/neutral/wise/funny words said in different interviews Anthony was never really trending on the Internet, but the second he says something mildly controversial you all suddenly care so much about what he has to say... Okay...

4) Acting like race has nothing to do with this situation is just stupid. If you think that the fact that he’s Black is not in any way relevant in this "drama” you’re wrong and maybe you should rethink your opinions keeping that in mind.

5) I understand the initial reaction of the fandom being frustration and hurt, but no one is forcing us to voice our opinions the second we learn about something. You can read the full article, listen to the whole interview. Look at what other people are saying and then provide your own take on the issue. I feel like way too many people just heard that there’s some drama going on and typed the first thing that came to their minds without stopping to think. As always.

6) Even if you don’t agree with everything that Anthony said claiming that his words make him homophobic is weird. His statement was vague and could be interpretend as something... ugh... “problematic” out of context, but if you actually listen to what he said you’d know what he meant. He really didn’t say: “I hate shipping Sam and Bucky, it’s gross and people who do that are awful”... Yet half the fandom acts like these are his actual words.

7) The website standing behind it is partially responsible for the backlash he got, because they framed his words in probably the worst possible way to promote the interview which I find incredibly unfair.

8) Also asking actors about shipping is not a great idea. It’s not their job to deal with fandoms who got angry about everything. And like I said: it doesn’t matter what his answer would be. Someone would hate him for it anyway. Also it’s not like Anthony’s opinion would matter to the Marvel Studios if they wanted to make Sambucky canon or not. I’m sure his view on this issue is entirely irrelevant to them. He’s not standing in your way to get some representation, come on.

9) By the way... Many of you don’t act like you care about representation if it’s not done in a very specific manner (something Mackie even spoke about in a way), so I don’t really trust that many of you actually give a shit about it, when it doesn’t fit your incredibly narrow interpretation of what should be represented... or when it doesn’t match your very specific aesthetic...

10) Some people brought it up and I was almost inclined to agree... “Platonic male friendhips are important! Just because you’re affectionate with other man doesn’t mean you’re gay” is usually a terrible argument used in fandoms by homophobes against making gay couples canon. But I feel like it’s a different thing when some random Twitter user says it and when it comes from a man who is asked over and over, and over, and over again how close exactly is he with his male co-worker that he likes in private life.

11) If you’ve seen other interviews done by Anthony Mackie (not just short clips promoting Marvel movies) you’d know that it’s not the first time he speaks about his opinions about the topic. It didn’t come out of nowhere. And I don’t think we should hold him to completely different standards just because he admitted to being more intolerant in the past, but few people are open enough to admit that and show they’re working to change. And maybe I’m biased, because I had to put actual effort into changing my worldview about some topics into a more progressive one before, but I feel like it’s important to give people time to re-learn after years of having worse opinions. Or to give them some benefit of the doubt and trust that they’re not your enemy, because they’re not always 100% perfect with their support.

12) Overall I just feel bad for him, because poor wording or not, I’m sure - judging by many of his previous statements - that he didn’t mean to say something harmful and yet everyone was ready to jump and hate him even more than they did before. At the end of the day he’s 40-something straight guy who has very limited experience with fandoms, so he (for a good reason) preferred to just avoid the topic. But he was pushed again and again to talk about it, until he finally said something that people didn’t like... Some of you were just wainting to have a weapon to use agains him... So, congratulations, now you have it.

----- ------- -----

... I’m just tired by this whole situation and disappointed in a lot of fans I previously liked. There were a few people who immediately jumped to criticize Mackie and judging by their words they didn’t really know what they were talking about. I had to change my opinion about few creators who I followed, because of their terrible behaviour after all of this and it honestly leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

And I’m not even a huge Anthony Mackie fan! As I’ve mentioned... I don’t like being too invested in actors lives, I just prefer to focus on their work and what they’ve created... with a few tiny exceptions. But seeing how the fandom reacted to his statement made me so annoyed and frustrated that it felt wrong to just be silent and pretend like nothings happening.