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Matt Healy Talks With The Guardian

Jason Tate

The 1975’s Matt Healy sat down with The Guardian to talk about the band’s upcoming album:

He selects a song that doesn’t sound at all anxious. It is surprisingly loose after ILWYS’s gleaming 80s pop architecture: all spilling piano chords, trumpet solos and vocals from the London Gospel Community Choir. It is about forgiving and mending himself. “I’m scared of the world,” he says. “I’m not scared of myself any more.”

Sparkling with Springsteen-like festivity, “It’s Not Living If It’s Not With You” is about addiction: “Collapse my veins wearing beautiful shoes,” Healy sings. There is a mellow song about rehab and he reckons their “Drake-y” tropical house experiment will be their biggest hit. The night before, Healy saw James Taylor live and marvelled at the simplicity of his enduring hits. One lounge jazz number on the album is exactly that kind of love song, about passing the age where young people once settled down, and loosely fits the album’s theme of how the internet affects relationships, says Healy.

Undercover Facebook Moderator Was Instructed Not to Remove Hate Speech

Facebook
Jason Tate

Nick Statt, writing at The Verge:

An investigative journalist who went undercover as a Facebook moderator in the UK says the company lets pages from far-right fringe groups “exceed deletion threshold,” and that those pages are “subject to different treatment in the same category as pages belonging to governments and news organizations.” The accusation is a damning one, undermining Facebook’s claims that it is actively trying to cut down on fake news, propaganda, hate speech, and other harmful content that may have significant real-world impact.

Burn it all down.

Spotify Won’t Let Users Block Harassers

Jason Tate

Davey Alba, writing at BuzzFeed:

Since at least 2012, Spotify users like Meghan have been asking the music streaming giant for a block feature for a simple reason: Over the years, harassers and abusers have used the service to stalk and intimidate victims. […] A company representative told BuzzFeed News that Spotify “does not have any timeline on plans for a block feature.”

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Mark Zuckerberg Interviewed by Kara Swisher

Facebook
Jason Tate

Kara Swisher sat down with Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook. It did not go well:

Swisher: Okay. “Sandy Hook didn’t happen” is not a debate. It is false. You can’t just take that down?

Zuckerberg: I agree that it is false.

I also think that going to someone who is a victim of Sandy Hook and telling them, “Hey, no, you’re a liar” — that is harassment, and we actually will take that down. But overall, let’s take this whole closer to home…

I’m Jewish, and there’s a set of people who deny that the Holocaust happened. I find that deeply offensive. But at the end of the day, I don’t believe that our platform should take that down because I think there are things that different people get wrong. I don’t think that they’re intentionally getting it wrong, but I think—

Swisher: In the case of the Holocaust deniers, they might be, but go ahead.

Zuckerberg: It’s hard to impugn intent and to understand the intent. I just think, as abhorrent as some of those examples are, I think the reality is also that I get things wrong when I speak publicly. I’m sure you do. I’m sure a lot of leaders and public figures we respect do too, and I just don’t think that it is the right thing to say, “We’re going to take someone off the platform if they get things wrong, even multiple times.”

You know who isn’t coming into any argument in good faith? Holocaust deniers. Big tech’s inability to grasp what their moral obligation is given the power and influence they now have is one of the biggest crisis facing us today. They simply don’t want the responsibility for what they’ve built.

One of the Last Interviews With Anthony Bourdain

Jason Tate

One of the last interviews with Anthony Bourdain has been published. It’s full of wonderful anecdotes and stories:

I do find that my happiest moments on the road are not standing on the balcony of a really nice hotel. That’s a sort of bittersweet — if not melancholy — alienating experience, at best. My happiest moments on the road are always off-camera, generally with my crew, coming back from shooting a scene and finding ourselves in this sort of absurdly beautiful moment, you know, laying on a flatbed on those things that go on the railroad track, with a putt-putt motor, goin’ across like, the rice paddies in Cambodia with headphones on… this is luxury, because I could never have imagined having the freedom or the ability to find myself in such a place, looking at such things.

To sit alone or with a few friends, half-drunk under a full moon, you just understand how lucky you are; it’s a story you can’t tell. It’s a story you almost by definition, can’t share. I’ve learned in real time to look at those things and realize: I just had a really good moment.

Patrick Stump Composing Score for ‘Alice in Wonderland’

Patrick Stump
Jason Tate

Dana Schwartz, writing for Entertainment Weekly:

“When you’re doing a score, it’s kind of like acting, really, because you have to get in the head of a character,” said Stump, “whereas with Fall Out Boy, if I’m writing a song, I’m going to have to get on stage every night and sing that. It’s really for me. Writing a song is more — not selfish, but you’re focused on what you would want, whereas in a film you’re just focused on telling the story.”

Lights ‘Skin&Earth’ Coming to TV and Games

Lights
Jason Tate

Denise Petski, writing for Deadline:

Entertainment One has secured IP to Skin&Earth, a graphic comic series written and illustrated by alt-pop singer/songwriter Lights, to adapt for television as well as digital and gaming content.

eOne will adapt all six issues of the comic, which tells story of a girl looking for hope in a hopeless world. Caught between the romance and cults, gods and mortals, and just trying to find a good borscht, Enaia Jin is led down a dark path by new lovers that reveal a twisted fantasy world and her own true nature.

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Apple Showcases New Emoji

Emoji
Jason Tate

To celebrate World Emoji Day, Apple has shared a preview of the new emoji arriving later this year:

More than 70 new emoji characters are coming to iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch and Mac later this year in a free software update. The new emoji designs, created based on approved characters in Unicode 11.0, include even more hair options to better represent people with red hair, gray hair and curly hair, a new emoji for bald people, and new smiley faces that bring more expression to Messages with a cold face, party face, pleading face and a face with hearts.

Oh yeah, ball of yarn, score!

Don’t Feed the Trolls, and Other Hideous Lies

Jason Tate

Film Crit Hulk, writing at The Verge:

One of the most popular solutions that arose in online culture was, again, the mantra of “don’t feed the trolls.” This meant that any time a troll popped up in an online situation making inflammatory remarks, you were supposed to ignore them because responding would derail the thread and give them the attention they wanted. What no one seems to remember is it never worked, practically on any level. There was always someone who wanted to troll back in the opposite direction, someone who genuinely got offended for a personal and valid reason, or someone who wanted to try to be reasonable. Instead of solving anything, “don’t feed the trolls” became a motto for people who want to act above it all or regale us with stories about how much harder it was to troll back in their day when they had to troll uphill, both ways! But most of all, it became the mantra of how to ignore online abuse completely.

Fantastic piece. Definitely worth the read.

Ten Years Since ‘The Dark Knight’

Jason Tate

It’s been ten years since the release of The Dark Knight. Matt Patches writes about the film over at Polygon:

The Dark Knight is elegantly excessive, a confluence of Nolan’s film-tech obsessions, philosophical puzzles, and wealth of popcorn movie knowledge. Everything that can be explored — architecture, performance, film chemistry, noir tropes, screenwriting “rules,” practical special effects, Ethics 101, action geography, orchestral sound, the Levenson Self-Report Psychopathy Scale, pragmatic costuming, the spectrum of humor, truck mechanics — is explored.

The lead-up to this movie, my massive expectations, and then finally seeing it and it being as good as I wanted, was maybe the most fulfilling moviegoing experience of my life. It remains one of my favorite movies to this day.

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Travis Barker Involved in Car Accident

Travis Barker
Jason Tate

Travis Barker of Blink-182 was involved in a car accident with a school bus on Friday, July 13th:

Law enforcement sources tell TMZ no children were on the bus and Travis was not at fault.

After the crash Travis was walking around and did not appear seriously injured, although he did seem dazed. There were passengers in Travis’ car, including his son. We do not know their condition, but the collision was serious enough for Barker’s air bags to deploy.

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