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Blog: The Boy Scouts Can Do a Good Turn Finally

The New York Times
Jason Tate

James Dale, writing for The New York Times:

The Mormon Church’s latest announcement suggests that this time has come. It would therefore be a good moment for the Boy Scouts of America to take the opportunity to end anti-gay discrimination within its organization, without exception. The Boy Scouts has debated this issue for so many years already, to which I bear witness from my own struggles to change scouting so that it would accept gay youth and leaders.

In 1990, the Boy Scouts expelled me for being gay. I was a 19-year-old assistant scoutmaster in the New Jersey troop where I earned my Eagle Scout badge. For the next decade, I fought my expulsion, challenging the anti-gay policy on the basis that it violated New Jersey’s law against discrimination, including sexual-orientation discrimination.

In 2000, my lawsuit ended up before the United States Supreme Court. The justices then held, by a 5-to-4 vote, that the Boy Scouts of America was exempt from the state law prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation because of the First Amendment. The court concluded that the Boy Scouts effectively had a legal right to exclude gay people because the organization viewed them as “immoral” and “unclean.”

Medium Now Offers Audio Versions of Its Stories for Members

Jason Tate

Ken Yeung, writing for VentureBeat:

Medium is hoping to sweeten the pot in order to get you to become a paying member. The publishing platform provider said that members will now be provided an audio version of every “exclusive, member-funded story” along with some additional selections chosen by the company’s editorial team. More than 50 stories are now available as audio versions, with more being added in the future.

PayPal Sues Pandora Over Logo

Pandora
Jason Tate

PayPal is taking Pandora to court over their new similar logo:

The digital-payment company says Pandora’s big blue “P,” unveiled in October, damages its business because customers are mistakenly opening the wrong app on their phones.

“I was a little confused when I opened PayPal and Barenaked Ladies started playing,” one PayPal customer tweeted.

Lena Waithe Wrote Her Most Personal Story for ‘Master of None’

Jason Tate

E. Alex Jung, writing for Vulture:

“Thanksgiving,” the eighth episode of Master of None’s second season, is the most personal thing Lena Waithe has ever written. She and Aziz Ansari wrote the episode together in a hotel room in London, filtering her own coming-out experience through Denise, her character on the show. The episode is quietly epic, in large part due to the direction by Melina Matsoukas, who paid attention to the details from the cross on the wall to the plastic covers of the couch. “Thanksgiving” is a paean to the beauty of annual rituals and how we think about real and imagined families.

I absolutely loved this season of Master of None, and this episode was one of the highlights.

FCC Votes to Begin Dismantling Net Neutrality

Jason Tate

Karl Bode, writing for TechDirt:

Surprising absolutely nobody, the FCC today voted 2-1 along strict party lines to begin dismantling net neutrality protections for consumers. The move comes despite the fact that the vast majority of non-bot comments filed with the FCC support keeping the rules intact. And while FCC boss Ajit Pai has breathlessly insisted he intended to listen to the concerns of all parties involved, there has been zero indication that this was a serious commitment as he begins dismantling all manner of broadband consumer protections, not just net neutrality.

As you might have expected, the FCC was quick to release a statement claiming that gutting the popular consumer protections would usher forth a magical age of connectivity, investment, and innovation.

An Oral History of ‘No Pads, No Helmets…Just Balls’

Simple Plan
Jason Tate

Simple Plan did a little oral history of No Pads, No Helmets…Just Balls over at Alt Press:

That record could have taken, at the most, two months to make; it took a year. We were living in very close quarters, sleeping in a windowless room with bunkbeds. We were cooking for ourselves, which is normal, but nobody knew how to cook, so it was horrible. It was a tedious process. Arnold had this vision where he would say, “You guys record yourself, I’m going to come back and criticize and edit it,” and that’s exactly what he’d do. He would leave us days at a time in the studio, I would record the whole album, he would come back and be, like, “Yeah, you could do better,” and scratch everything I did. It was frustrating.

Reset was still better.

Matt Skiba Talks with Ultimate Guitar

Blink-182
Jason Tate

Matt Skiba talked with Ultimate Guitar about writing and recording with Blink-182:

I would bring a song into the studio, we’d work on it or I would send a very crude demo to Mark and Travis and then go in the next day and kind of learn it and everybody bring their own thing to it. We would track it at Travis’ studio.

We were doing this for several months. The songs were good. It was cool but it didn’t sound like Blink. The songs I was bringing in sounded like [Alkaline Trio].

Facebook’s Anti-Fake News Initiative May Not Be Working

Facebook
Jason Tate

Sam Levin, writing for The Guardian:

“A bunch of conservative groups grabbed this and said, ‘Hey, they are trying to silence this blog – share, share share,’” said Winthrop, who published the story that falsely claimed hundreds of thousands of Irish people were brought to the US as slaves. “With Facebook trying to throttle it and say, ‘Don’t share it,’ it actually had the opposite effect.”

The MP3 Isn’t Dead

Jason Tate

The MP3 format is about to have the patents surrounding it expire. Here’s Jason Snell, writing at Six Colors on what that means:

One of the companies who held patents covering some uses of the MP3 format has terminated its licensing program because its patents have run out. What this means is not that the MP3 format is about to evaporate, but rather, that lots of audio software that previously avoided encoding files into MP3 will now be free to support it without paying a tithe to Fraunhofer.

This is great news for everyone. I’ve spoken to several developers of audio and MP3-related software who have been watching the clock run out on MP3 patents so that they could release MP3 features into the world—both in brand-new apps as well as existing ones—without buying into Fraunhofer’s expensive licensing regime.

And Marco Arment:

Until a few weeks ago, there had never been an audio format that was small enough to be practical, widely supported, and had no patent restrictions, forcing difficult choices and needless friction upon the computing world. Now, at least for audio, that friction has officially ended. There’s finally a great choice without asterisks.

MP3 is supported by everything, everywhere, and is now patent-free. There has never been another audio format as widely supported as MP3, it’s good enough for almost anything, and now, over twenty years since it took the world by storm, it’s finally free.

I still remember the first MP3 I downloaded (it was The Simpsons’ theme song) and not understanding how it was such a small file. I was blown away.

Inside the New Apple Campus

Jason Tate

Steve Levy goes inside Apple’s new spaceship campus:

We drive through an entrance that takes us under the building and into the courtyard before driving back out again. Since it’s a ring, of course, there is no main lobby but rather nine entrances. Ive opts to take me in through the café, a massive atrium-like space ascending the entire four stories of the building. Once it’s complete, it will hold as many as 4,000 people at once, split between the vast ground floor and the balcony dining areas. Along its exterior wall, the café has two massive glass doors that can be opened when it’s nice outside, allowing people to dine al fresco.

L.A. Reid Fired From Epic Records

Epic Records
Jason Tate

The NY Post is reporting that L.A. Reid has been removed as chairman and CEO of Epic Records:

L.A. Reid, the influential head of Epic Records, was ousted from the Sony Music label after a co-worker complained to the company about several instances of alleged sex harassment, The Post has learned.

The 60-year old music industry veteran allegedly made inappropriate physical advances toward an assistant at last December’s company holiday party, among other instances, according to a March 22 letter a lawyer for the woman sent to Julie Swidler, Sony Music’s General Counsel, said a source who provided details from the letter.

Blog: Winners and Losers of the Recent Nuclear Holocaust

Jason Tate

McSweeneys:

The nation was recently rocked by retaliatory nuclear blasts that have turned much of America into a barren wasteland, decimating the population, triggering the rise of firestorms and supervolcanoes, and generally bringing civilization to the brink of collapse. Let’s take a look at the political fallout.

Perfect satire of the “politics as theatre” bullshit made popular by Chris Cillizza and the like.