iTunes Movies is turning 10. To celebrate they’ve released six bundles from a variety of studios each containing ten movies for ten bucks each. There’s some good movies in quite a few of these (and some really bad ones). Worth giving a look at least.
Rob Harvilla, writing for The Ringer, with a retrospective look at bunch of the songs and artists that were “banned” after the events of September 11th, 2001:
But 15 years later, it’s the songs the radio wouldn’t play that tell you the most.
In the week after the attacks, Clear Channel Communications, the Texas-based radio empire then controlling nearly 1,200 radio stations reaching 110 million listeners nationwide, drew up an informal blacklist of sorts — more than 150 songs its DJs should avoid, so as not to upset or offend anyone. As a Snopes investigation subsequently revealed, adherence was voluntary, and many stations ignored it; at the time, sheepish anonymous employees described it to The New York Times as a corporate memo gone wrong, snowballing thanks to an “overzealous regional executive” who kept adding more songs and soliciting more input. A wayward reply-all email debacle made sentient.
Carimah Townes, writing for Think Progress, on prison labor in America:
People behind bars are forced to do grueling, back-breaking, and dangerous work for nickles and dimes, while corporations rack up billions of dollars in profit off the cheap labor. They are put to work under the guise of rehabilitation, but the reality is that few people leave prison with the skills, knowledge, or resources to succeed professionally. They are an enticing alternative for large companies that don’t want to pay minimum wage to workers on the outside. And they have had enough.
On Friday, prisoners all over the country launched a national labor strike that’s been months in the making. Their demand is difficult but simple: ending prison slavery for good.
Early reviews for the new Apple AirPods seem to be pretty good. Here’s Susie Ochs, from Macworld:
Not only did I dance, I headbanged. I shook my head side to side, I tossed my hair, I jogged in place, and I looked silly doing all of it. The AirPods stayed put, and they stayed loud. The music (more Sia, naturally) sounded full and lush and I couldn’t hear a single word anyone around me was saying, as if I was completely sealed off in a bubble of rock and roll. Pretty impressive.
My dream has always been to walk around and talk to my computer like Ender, so I’m probably going to give these a shot.1 For those interested in being able to charge your phone and listen to audio with a cord at the same time, it looks like Belkin has released a $40 “audio + charge” dongle, and Apple’s own dock comes with a 3.5mm headphone jack on it. I charge my iPhone in an Elevation dock so I’ve never really charged my phone and listened via headphones with a cord anyway, but, it does look like there’s a couple solutions here.
I’ll write something up about what I think, in October, on how they work for music and podcast listening.↩
Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon and The National’s Aaron Dessner have announced that their Eaux Claires Music & Arts Festival will return 2017.
Eaux Claires is proud to return for its third edition, June 16+17, 2017.
A very limited number of presale tickets will be available on Friday, September 9 at 10am CST. During this presale, you can also secure camping and camp access passes.
More information about 2017 will be released in the coming months…
Jessica Chastain, Michael Cera, and Idris Alba have all been tapped to star in the upcoming film, Molly’s Game, written and directed by Aaron Sorkin. Borys Kit, writing for The Hollywood Reporter:
Chastain is starring as the film’s title character, a skier who, after her Olympic dreams are dashed, heads to Los Angeles and becomes a cocktail waitress. But she rises through the social circuit to became an organizer of underground poker games for the Hollywood elite, with players including Ben Affleck, Leonardo DiCaprio and Tobey Maguire. The real-life Bloom’s poker games came to an end when she was arrested by the FBI.
Joe Manganiello has been cast as Deathstroke for the upcoming Ben Affleck helmed Batman movie.
Geoff Johns, president of DC Entertainment and co-chief of DC Movies, confirmed the casting during an interview with The Wall Street Journal. It was also revealed that Johns, who was recently promoted to oversee DC’s film division, is currently writing the solo Batman feature that’s set to be directed by Affleck. In addition to Batman, the prolific comic book writer is working to develop The Flash, Aquaman, and Cyborg for the big screen. (WSJ also reports that Johns did a rewrite of the Wonder Woman script and worked with director Patty Jenkins to get it right; similarly, he worked with Zack Snyder on rewrites for The Justice League, which is currently filming in London.)
Cymbals Eat Guitars are streaming their new album, Pretty Years, on NPR.
The new Against Me! album, Shape Shift With Me, is streaming in full over at NPR. The album is due out next Friday, September 16th.
Nathan Hall, writing on Medium, about the relationship between movies and music in 2016:
Sing Street is another film about a band, focused more on the actual lifestyle and artistic side than the killing skinheads aspect. It’s one of the most beautiful distillations of what draws us to music, what it means to us to hear things expressed musically in a way we’ve never felt before, and the development of one’s own expression through the same medium. Ferdia Welsh-Peelo plays Conor, a young teen whose parents are fighting and whose brother is a burnout and who just had to enroll in a new school where the headmaster would rather you didn’t wear shoes at all if you don’t have the dress-code approved black ones. Amidst this angst, there’s the music.
Busted has updated their website with a mailing list sign up and a video that just flashes “Fri 9th September” over and over again.
The Front Bottoms released a bunch of demos for stream on their website.
John Paczkowski, writing at Buzzfeed about Apple killing the headphone jack:
“It was holding us back from a number of things we wanted to put into the iPhone,” Riccio says. “It was fighting for space with camera technologies and processors and battery life. And frankly, when there’s a better, modern solution available, it’s crazy to keep it around.”
It’s hard to imagine Apple’s hardware design team hamstrung by a diminutive legacy port. But when you’re dealing with a computing device with extraordinarily tight dimensional tolerances, there are bound to be challenges. Riccio spends a good 15 minutes explaining them. I’ll try to do it in two.
Like it or hate it — the decision making process really is interesting.
David Kamp, with the cover story on Bruce Springsteen for Vanity Fair:
What might better serve the good of the Republic is the planned release, sometime next year, of Springsteen’s first album of entirely new songs since Wrecking Ball. (His last studio album, 2014’s High Hopes, consisted of covers, new recordings of older songs, and orphaned songs from sessions for his preceding albums.) The new album, as yet untitled, has been finished for more than a year but has sat on the shelf while Springsteen has busied himself with the tour and the book.
That makes at least two really good articles in this issue — the other being from Nick Bilton on Theranos.
Apple will be, presumably, debuting new iPhones tomorrow at their annual September event. Jason Snell, at Six Colors, has a good run down on what to expect, and what to look for:
Is there an additional wireless audio story? There have been rumors swirling around for a while that part of the headphone-jack removal would be a new set of Apple-branded wireless headphones, dubbed EarPods. Whether or not that rumor is true, I’m curious how Apple promotes wireless audio. Does it highlight Beats? Does it unveil new Apple-branded headphones? Does it use an alternative technology to Bluetooth?
The Apple thread in our forums is always a fun place to talk about the announcements when they drop. So, if you’re watching tomorrow morning at 10:00am (PDT), come join in while we complain about our headphone jack-less future.