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Inside the Mind of Steven Spielberg

Jason Tate

Jon Mooallem, writing at Wired, with a giant profile on Steven Spielberg:

That’s just how it is: all your feelings bound up together. You are scared of so many things but simultaneously drawn to them. You are infatuated with airplanes but terrified of flying. You love Disney films but later describe the shooting of Bambi’s mother as giving you PTSD. Outside of your bedroom window in New Jersey, across a long, empty field, is a tremendous tree. “I was terrified by the tree. It was a huge tree,” you’ll later remember, and at night you watch its dark silhouette morph into horrible, demonic things. “Every single night my imagination would find something else to fear.” And still, you stare at the tree every single night. You revisit the things that scare you until they don’t scare you anymore. You love that cycle of tension and resolution; it will become another trademark of your films.

Cards Against Humanity Launches Political Expansion

Cards Against Humanity
Jason Tate

Cards Against Humanity has launched their “America Votes” expansion packs for sale:

Today, we’re letting America choose between two new expansion packs about either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump.

At the end of this promotion, Cards Against Humanity will tally up the sales of both packs, and depending on which pack gets more support, we will donate all the money in support of Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

Inside Tim Cook’s Apple

Apple
Jason Tate

Fast Company has a fantastic, and in-depth, profile on Apple:

With Macs, iPads, and software applications and services, Apple isn’t a one-trick pony like BlackBerry, to use an example cited by those most freaked out about the recent iPhone slowdown. It recorded $50.6 billion in sales during that “disappointing” quarter, more than the combined revenue of Google parent Alphabet ($20.3 billion) and Amazon ($29.1 billion) over the same period. Its $10.5 billion in profits outpaced not just the combination of Alphabet ($4.2 billion) and Amazon ($513 million) but also Facebook ($1.5 billion) and Microsoft ($3.8 billion).

“I don’t read all the coverage on Apple that there is,” Cook tells me a few days after my lunch with Cue and Federighi. “The way that I look at that is, I really know the truth.” And he’s ready to talk about it.

The piece is written by one of the the authors of Becoming Steve Jobs, which is the book I most recommend (even over his own biography) people read to understand Apple and Steve.

Misogyny in the Scene. Still.

Jason Tate

Sydney Shaw, writing on her blog, highlights some of the misogyny she witnessed in our music scene while doing her job as a journalist. This description from Warped Tour made my stomach turn:

I listened to a man yell slurs at one of the female photographers shooting Yellowcard’s set. “Who’d you blow to get in front of the barrier?” he asked. “And aren’t you hot in those jeans, baby? It’s 90 degrees.”

I saw a man try to slip his hand up the shorts of a young woman crowdsurfing over him. She kicked at him when she realized what was happening and grazed the side of his face with her Converse sneaker. He clutched at the spot on his cheek and called her a “fucking bitch.” He said he hopes she gets dropped on her head.

Rihanna Joins ‘Ocean’s Eleven’ Spin-Off

Film
Jason Tate

The Hollywood Reporter is reporting that Rihanna has joined the Ocean’s Eleven spin-off Ocean’s Ocho.

Sandra Bullock and Cate Blanchett — both of whom have been long rumored to star in the movie — will head up the cast of the Gary Ross-helmed heist film that is scheduled to begin production in October in New York.

Like the Oceans Eleven films, the rest of the ensemble is stacked with major stars including Anne Hathaway and Helena Bonham Carter. Mindy Kaling also is joining the cast, with music stars Rihanna (Battleship) and Awkwafina (Neighbors 2) rounding out the group.

It’s About Passion, Not Algorithms

Jason Tate

Mark Sullivan interviewed Apple Music’s Bozoma Saint John for Fast Company:

We should be paying attention to all of the ways that people want to listen to music, I mean, truly. Each point of interest is equally important as the other. I really like R&B from 1993, but I really like R&B that I just heard last week, too. How do I get served both of those things, because I am a complex music listener? By the way, you don’t have to be a music-phile in order to have that experience. Even a casual listener at the end of the day does not want to listen to the same thing again and again and again. You do want fresh; you want to be served something. I have learned that the balance of all of those things between the security of listening, to everything I want to listen to, and being served something new, the experience of U.S. consumers or me as a consumer, all those things should be rated equally.

BitTorrent Launches Discovery Fund

Jason Tate

BitTorrent has announced the “Discovery Fund:”

Over the next year, BitTorrent aims to partner with 25 creators by providing cash grants and promotional support to build impactful releases and discover new fans. We are looking for artists, musicians, filmmakers, designers and other creators working on uncompromised projects representing a diverse, original perspective seeking global distribution. This open, international initiative has a rolling call (so you can apply when your project is ready) and provides $2,500- $100,000 in marketing and distribution funding to use at your discretion.

Artists an apply here.

The Stoner Arms Dealers: The Story Behind ‘War Dogs’

Rolling Stone
Jason Tate

The movie War Dogs is coming out next week and I finally sat down to read the Rolling Stone piece by Guy Lawson from 2011 about the story the movie is based on. A gripping read.

Packouz was baffled, stoned and way out of his league. “It was surreal,” he recalls. “Here I was dealing with matters of international security, and I was half-baked. I didn’t know anything about the situation in that part of the world. But I was a central player in the Afghan war — and if our delivery didn’t make it to Kabul, the entire strategy of building up the Afghanistan army was going to fail. It was totally killing my buzz. There were all these shadowy forces, and I didn’t know what their motives were. But I had to get my shit together and put my best arms-dealer face on.”