By Justin Sanders
Breaking their own exorbitant lobbyist-spending records has become a regular occurrence for Google – but that’s just one tool in their toolkit of political influence. Google also makes friends and influences people by soliciting scholarship at leading university campuses throughout the country. While dressed up as “research grants,” Google enriches a... Read more
Like many public organizations with strong opinions, we find that our social media posts attract a lot of strong support as well as a number of misinformed, mean-spirited, and even downright crazy online comments. We love our supporters and we silently curse the idiots who have nothing useful to offer.... Read more
By Justin Sanders
Even for the most well-adjusted among us, high school is a time when it’s easy to slip into loneliness, depression, and even despair. For Samantha Ramirez-Herrera, whose family moved to Arizona from Mexico when she was six years old, such feelings were a foregone conclusion. “High school was when I started... Read more
By Justin Sanders
It’s been a few months since we unleashed our chronological compendium of Facebook’s sorry state of affairs since Cambridge Analytica. Since then, the social media giant’s freefall into disgrace has only quickened, and the time has come for an update on its most recent tribulations. Part of the fight for... Read more
By Justin Sanders
It’s official – computers have thoroughly democratized the act of making music. All you need to lay down some sweet melodies anymore is a laptop and a “digital audio workstation” (DAW) – also known as recording software. What’s more, many of these DAWs, such as Pro Tools, are free to... Read more
By Justin Sanders
You’re tired. Tired of the data breaches, the fake news, the foreign meddling, and the vile rhetoric from partisan trolls. Tired of scandal. Tired of feeling manipulated by algorithms and smug CEOs offering patchwork solutions that fail to wholeheartedly address the problems at their core. You’re tired of social media,... Read more
By Justin Sanders
We’re almost a third of the way through 2019, and Facebook and Google’s endlessly burning dumpster fire is still burning hotter than ever. Their most recent jaw-dropping Gaffe? While claiming to have their content moderation problems under control, both companies were left scrambling to remove millions of videos of a New... Read more
By Justin Sanders
The word “passion” came up a lot during our interview with filmmaker Michael Sucsy, and for good reason. If ever there was a career origin story attesting to the power of following’s one passion over the easy path, it’s his. Sucsy’s Grey Gardens (HBO, 2009) dramatized the real-life story made... Read more
By Ruth Vitale
Dear Werner Herzog, You are one of the most influential filmmakers of this generation and an artist of uncompromising vision. In all my years of running indie film studios, you were, and still are, a true icon for all of us. But a couple of your comments during a recent... Read more
By Ruth Vitale
On March 30, in an op-ed published in The Washington Post, the man who once coined the phrase “Move fast and break things” made a very public about-face. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg called for the internet to be regulated. “Every day, we make decisions about what speech is harmful, what constitutes... Read more