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The man who played the alien in ‘Alien.’

It is not Nori and Chicago’s essential personhood that prompts West to nurture them, but their relationship to him: one in which he is both role model and custodian, dream giver and disciplinarian. West cherishes the attendant control. Even in his attempt to share a realization that affects how he will now treat a sizable portion of the population, West once again centers himself. [...] West pays particular attention to the contours his daughters’ bodies may develop in the future, referencing his wife’s famously enhanced curves in the process. He threatens hypothetical future boyfriends, then imagines a scenario in which a battered daughter comes racing back to him. The lines are disturbing, reminiscent of how Donald Trump speaks about his eldest daughter, whom he has called “hot” and whose sex life he often alludes to. On an album full of references to a president whom West has received no shortage of criticism for defending, “Violent Crimes” stands out for the perverse intimacy with which it links West to Trump. The two men’s arrogance may be staggering, but the ease with which they discuss—and seek to control—women’s bodies is just as striking. Both men draw from deep reservoirs of entitlement; when trained on girls and women, that potent mixture of shielding and possession can grow much more pernicious.

Across ye’s seven tracks, Kanye digs his heels in — no apologies, no regrets or introspection, just barely coherent thoughts and barely complete songs. In fact, its single most original idea, and the only one I hope seeps into the culture is its brevity, though even that is wielded unsuccessfully.

As West sells it, ‘ye’ is an album devoted to the stand-off between visceral self-loathing and baroque levels of narcissism, further complicated by mental illness and a recent opiate addiction. Listening to ‘Killing You,’ it’s unclear whether West’s violent thoughts are directed at his wife or towards himself, or if he even means it at all: maybe a homicidal fantasy is just another badass way to start an album, an inverted “Ultralight Beam.” It is the work of a broken man, whatever the case. But to meet West on his terms here feels impossible. In his world, self-expression justifies itself, and speaking your most twisted thoughts out loud is an act of bravery, one that makes ‘I Thought About Killing You’ not just a fine thing to write and share, but a work made from a place of love. Art, then, is a way of existing beyond reproach, an excuse for everything.

Japan made itself rich in its industrial era by selling things like cars, TVs, and VCRs, but it made itself loved in those Lost Decades by selling fantasies. Hello Kitty, comics, anime, and Nintendo games were the first wave—“the big can-opener,” as the game designer Keiichi Yano put it. Now those childhood dreams haven given way to a more sophisticated vision of a Japanese life style, exemplified in the detached cool of Haruki Murakami novels, the defiantly girly pink feminism of kawaii culture, the stripped-down simplicity of Uniqlo, the “unbranded” products of Muji, and the Japanese “life-changing magic” of Marie Kondo. That these Japanese products are so popular, not only in America but in developed nations around the world, may indicate that we’re all groping for meaning in the same post-industrial haze.

Rahawa Haile considers how, by sliding between the real and unreal, Black Panther frees us to imagine the possibilities — and the limitations — of an Africa that does not yet exist. --- How then does one criticize what is unquestionably the best Marvel movie to date by every conceivable metric known to film criticism? How best to explain that Black Panther can be a celebration of blackness, yes; a silencing of whiteness, yes; a meshing of African cultures and signifiers — all this! — while also feeling like an exercise in sustained forgetting? That the convenience of having a fake country within a real continent is the way we can take inspiration from the latter without dwelling on its losses, or the causes of them. Black Panther is an American film through and through, one heavily invested in white America’s political absence from its African narrative. When Killmonger goads a museum curator early on in the film, calling out a history of looting, it is condemnation that falls squarely on Britain’s shoulders. Rarely must the audience think about the C.I.A.’s very real history in Africa. The fact that viewers were steered, at any point, into rooting for Martin Freeman, a British actor playing an American C.I.A. operative who attempts to purchase stolen resources from a white South African arms dealer, means that even a cinematic turducken of imperialist history gets a pass. [...] The convenience of having a fake country within a real continent is the way we can take inspiration from Africa without dwelling on its losses.

The spectres are textural. The surface noise of the sample unsettles the illusion of presence in at least two ways: first, temporally, by alerting us to the fact that what we are listening to is a phonographic revenant, and second, ontologically, by introducing the technical frame, the unheard material pre-condition of the recording, on the level of content. We're now so accustomed to this violation of ontological hierarchy that it goes unnoticed. But in his Wire piece, Simon refers to the shock he experienced when he first heard records constructed entirely out of samples. I vividly recall the first time I went into studio and heard vocal samples played through a mixing desk; I really do remember saying, 'It's like hearing ghosts...'

A new study suggests that one reason seniors are more conservative politically than younger cohorts of Americans is that poorer people don’t live as long and suffer from health conditions that inhibit voting and other forms of political activity.

The singer and actress reflects on her two decades of silence and looks ahead to the new generation discovering her legacy.

i put out a Baths record called Romaplasm last year that i’m still real proud of!! i had to kill like 30 mins and i thought it’d be fun to mention some of the easter eggs (?) in it that people may have missed 😬✨

In 1761 Benjamin Franklin was in London representing the Pennsylvania Legislature to Parliament. Franklin was very interested in music: he was a capable amateur musician, attended concerts regularly, and even wrote a string quartet! One of the concerts Franklin attended was by Deleval, a colleague of his in the Royal Academy, who performed on a set of water tuned wineglasses patterned after Pockridge's instrument. Franklin was enchanted, and determined to invent and build 'a more convenient' arrangement. Franklin's new invention premiered in early 1762, played by Marianne Davies—a well known musician in London who learned to play Franklin's new invention. Initially Franklin named it the 'glassychord', but soon settled on 'armonica' as the name for his new invention—after the Italian word for harmony "armonia". Apparently Franklin built a second instrument for Ms. Davies, as she toured Europe with hers, while Franklin returned to Philadelphia with his own.

Tina Fey and Rachel Bloom are changing the way female comics engaged with male gatekeepers. [...] That might be what’s most remarkable about these interviews: Despite their candor, these female comics aren’t cold or unavailable or uninteresting. They’re almost actively carving out a “third way”: not playing along and not charging toward confrontation. That doesn’t mean they withhold the kinds of intimate disclosures that make conversations like these worthwhile: Fey breaks down talking about her father, and Bloom is frank about her fears of becoming a parent. But both firmly decline to participate in the standard insider dynamic. The takeaway, for those tuning in, is that these conversations aren’t about showcasing the camaraderie of those onstage or behind the mic. Rather than affirm her links to Letterman against an audience that doesn’t “get” her sketch, Fey talks to them—and shows she’s listening, and that her frame of reference is bigger than the usual club of two.

Here in late capitalism, our only real power is as consumers, en masse. We need organizing forces like #MuteRKelly. But can a company that is still making money off the person they are protesting ever really play that role?

Which brings us to journalists’ general silence when Trump and his lackeys say cruel things about Muslims, Mexicans, and immigrants. Journalists believe they must remain mum, lest they appear biased. God forbid one has a bias against racism; that must be an enormous handicap in performing journalism in a nation that is projected to not have a racial or ethnic majority within the next four decades. The same night that Wolf made her true statements at the correspondents’ dinner, Trump supporters at a Trump event booed the mention of “Hispanics,” literally condemning an entire ethnicity — for the second time in a single week. I suppose reporters do what they must to get the stories they can. But I’d encourage them to avoid signaling to the American people that you either don’t realize or don’t care that we are being lied to every day, that we can’t trust you to recognize authoritarianism and fascism when you see it, that you are so far removed from the life of “citizen” in your pursuit of information of these elites that when they’re separating us into Childless Unmarrieds and Women Deserving of Respect, you’re not going to sit by quietly, unable to speak out, lest you show “bias” that inhibits your ability to claim an EXCLUSIVE! SCOOP! handed to you by officials who have decided they’re okay with that information getting out.

Bullying happens along a gradient of existing power and reiterates it. That’s the difference between bullying and a fair fight: The bully is bigger and stronger and safer, and wields those advantages over someone smaller and weaker and more vulnerable. Michelle Wolf got off some zingers at Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s expense at an ultra-exclusive social event entirely filled by people whose livelihoods Sanders holds in her hands. Beyond that, as a basic function of her job, Sanders enjoys access to the water main of American political consciousness unmatched by pretty much any living person not named Donald Trump—a privilege she uses only and entirely for the purpose of pumping poison into it, aided by a healthy plurality of the people in that room but not by Michelle Wolf. I doubt there is a forum in existence in which Wolf could do anything that would qualify as “bullying” the press secretary of the President of the United States, but even if there is, the fucking White House Correspondents’ Dinner isn’t it.

What is an emotional man (I know, even writing that feels hideous) that isn’t consigned to the lower echelon of masculinity such as the “weepy horny beard guy” or the too-eager hyperactive type. How does one fight the stigma of being emotional without succumbing to the very stigma itself. How does one live righteously while suppressing a majority of feelings every day. I’m not sure. I buckle under a wave of stoicism exerted by a history of fathers every day.

This is a list of compact disc albums with tracks hidden in the pregap of the first track.

I ask her some easy questions, but she answers them with increasing irritation. When we have been together for three hours, I feel it's time to ask The Question. It's the same question that other black interviewers have asked her. A question she seems to deeply dislike—so much so that she complains about the question in her book. But even in the book, it's not a question she actually answers: How is her racial fluidity anything more than a function of her privilege as a white person? If Dolezal's identity only helps other people born white become black while still shielding them from the majority of the oppression of visible blackness, and does nothing to help those born black become white—how is this not just more white privilege?

But, crucially, Dolezal does explain what she thinks blackness entails, and what she thinks it means to be black. She talks about civil rights activism and black authors. She talks about hair. She does hair. She brags that none of her black clients dropped her in light of the scandal. Dolezal proudly mismanages her own haggard braids, which she clearly regards as a crucial set piece in her grotesque production of blackness. Dolezal talks about blackness as if it were reducible to two qualities, and only two qualities: scholarship and aesthetics. It cannot occur to her that blackness—a social construction, indeed—is a comprehensive and involuntary realm of experience. White power invented it, and white power enforces it, but, paradoxically, black people own blackness. Throughout the documentary, several black women tell Dolezal as much. Dolezal disputes their authority in the vaguest terms, but nonetheless assuredly. She has decided that she is black, so she’s black. Dolezal

“Anyone perusing the list of past winners cannot help noticing that many if not most of the country’s greatest musical minds are conspicuously missing,” composer John Adams told the New York Times in 2003, the year he won the prize for “On the Transmigration of Souls,” a commissioned reflection on the 9/11 attacks. Adams listed off many of the notable musicians who never earned a Pulitzer, from “Monk (Meredith or Thelonious)” to Philip Glass to Laurie Anderson. “Most if not all of these genuinely creative spirits have been passed over year after year, often in favor of academy composers who have won a disproportionate number of prizes.” The sentiment was clear: prize jurors prefer the safe and scholarly to the unpredictable and world-shifting.

A neat way to create clean screenshots of code. Create and share beautiful images of your source code. Start typing or drop a file into the text area to get started.

Single parents across race and class lines struggle to secure safe and affordable childcare on short notice, and often those parents are faced with hard decisions. They can take the children to work or to a job interview with them and risk violating company policy (and, by extension, their chances of maintaining or securing a position with the company). They can leave the children at home, if they’re old enough, in “latchkey” situations. They can leave them with a childcare provider they don’t know and haven’t had time to vet. Or they can cancel their obligation, risking much-needed income. No decision is without its consequences, but black mothers find themselves making these decisions (and facing legal and penal consequences) disproportionately. These institutional consequences compound the economic stress and hardship one-income households already face.

Ehhhhhhh I’m *real* skeptical of the ‘this is it’ thing ‘cause we‘ve heard it a thousand times now. But I want to save this for posterity. The raid on the offices of President Trump’s personal lawyer makes clear that Trump’s battle with the special counsel, Robert Mueller, is entering its final chapter.

Mainly, just listen to women. Listen to us and believe us. It’s the only place to start if you actually want all women to have a “Happy International Women’s Day.”

A new type of Payola is taking place on Spotify, with artists using third-party services to get added to influential playlists, and the company is inadvertently paying for it.

The true believers won’t stop until they’ve remade the world. Some of it will be thrilling. Some of it will keep us up at night. [...] What Silicon Valley loves most isn’t the products, or the platforms underneath them, but markets. “Figure out the business model later” was the call of the early commercial internet. The way you monetize vast swaths of humanity is by creating products that people use a lot—perhaps a search engine such as Google or a social network like Facebook. You build big transactional web platforms beneath them that provide amazing things, like search results or news feeds ranked by relevance, and then beneath all that you build marketplaces for advertising—a true moneymaking machine. If you happen to create an honest-to-god marketplace, you can get unbelievably rich.

Krasner’s mass incarceration memo outlining criminal justice reforms is a dream come true.

It’s time for a digital protection agency. It’s clear ethics don’t scale, and it’s not just Facebook’s problem.

Are there rules when it comes to edits? Should there be? RA's Will Lynch explores all sides of a thorny issue that shows no sign of going away. [...] Is it really enough to tweak a platinum-selling record and put your name on it? It doesn't help that many edits, not least those in the Wolf + Lamb camp, replace the original artist's name with that of the editing artist ("Soul Clap - Extravaganza" instead of "Jamie Foxx - Extravaganza (Soul Clap Edit)"). Granted, this is only meant to keep snooping lawyers from stumbling upon an illegal edit through Google, and when the edit is of a widely known pop song, the assumption is that listeners will recognize the original. But is that valid?

Unlocking the mysteries behind the Scottish electronic duo’s hallucinatory classic, which turns 20 this month.