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Fox host Bret Baier texts internally that night: “There is NO evidence of fraud. None. Allegations — stories. Twitter. Bulls---. Nothing concrete. That will affect the spread in any of these states.”

While texting about Trump and his business ventures, host Tucker Carlson says: “All of them fail. What he’s good at is destroying things. He’s the undisputed world champion of that. He could easily destroy us if we play it wrong. It’s so obvious.”

Bartiromo speaks with Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani on the phone, and Giuliani acknowledges he “can’t prove” that Pelosi has an interest in Dominion, according to a tape of the conversation unearthed by MSNBC. Giuliani also says it’s “a little harder” to prove allegations against Dominion than other claims.

Carlson texts, “With Trump behind it, an alternative like newsmax could be devastating to us.”

Host Neil Cavuto cuts away from a news conference after White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany says Democrats are “welcoming fraud” and “illegal voting.” “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Cavuto says, adding, “Unless she has more details to back that up, I can’t in good countenance continue showing you this.” An employee on Fox Corp. executive Raj Shah’s team emails Shah and others about Cavuto, labeling it a “Brand Threat.”

After Fox reporter Jacqui Heinrich fact-checks a Trump tweet mentioning Fox’s coverage, Carlson texts, “Please get her fired. Seriously. … It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke.”

Also internally, Ingraham calls Powell “a complete nut” and says: “No one will work with her. Ditto with Rudy.” Carlson responds: “It’s unbelievably offensive to me. Our viewers are good people and they believe it. … She’s soliciting ‘millions of dollars’ in checks made out to her personally.”On her show that night, Ingraham refers to “affidavits from people who have been working in ballot counting for 20 years, who cited really disturbing things that they had seen.”

Pirro executive producer Jerry Andrews emails Fox executives Meade Cooper and David Clark, saying Pirro’s upcoming monologue “is rife w conspiracy theories and bs and is yet another example why this woman should never be on live television.”Fox internally fact-checks Pirro’s upcoming monologue, designating a claim about Dominion’s ties to Venezuela as “INCORRECT/CANNOT CONFIRM.”Nov. 21Return to menuPirro makes the claim on her show anyway, saying, “The president’s lawyers [are] alleging a company called Dominion, which they say started in Venezuela with Cuban money and with the assistance of Smartmatic software, a back door is capable of flipping votes. And the president’s lawyers [are] alleging that American votes in a presidential election are actually counted in a foreign country. These are serious allegations, but the media has no interest in any of this.”

Fox anchor Eric Shawn does an on-air fact check of Trump’s claims about voter fraud and a “massive dump of votes” in key states, calling Trump’s allegations “false and unsubstantiated.” In an email exchange about the segment, Scott tells Cooper that segment was “bad for business” and notes it clashed with other Fox programming. “This has to stop now,” Scott says.

In an email exchange with Ryan, Rupert Murdoch says, “Wake up call for Hannity, who has been privately disgusted by Trump for weeks, but was scared to lose viewers!”

In an email to Scott, Rupert Murdoch proposes having Fox’s three prime-time hosts combine to say something to the effect of “the election is over and Joe Biden won. We are all disappointed, but it happened.” He adds that it “would go a long way to stop the Trump myth that the election stolen. And the basis of his 2024 campaign.” The hosts never deliver such a message.

And that a core portion of book two was about how wartime footing caused famines and death and hardship, and then there was an explosion of freedom, innovation, and overconfidence. He critiques both the East and the West. I liked that.

I’ve only finished Books 1 and 2, and truth be told, I read them because I wanted to know what would happen. So I’m definitely more into it for the big concepts and ideas than the stories. But I did find some of the stories very interesting, moving, or sad, or surprising, and I really liked the fact that during the first book, he talked about the Cultural Revolution, and censorship, and stifling political pressure, and as a Chinese insider rather than a critical outsider.

The strength of this book is scale and innovation. The 'writing' is not necessarily the best quality. The author is an engineer, not a professional writer, so you can only expect so much. In return, the ideas are much wilder than the typical sci-fi.

For scale, there are two aspects. First is the depth: you start in the cold war era and literally go the end of the universe, with all the major steps in between. Compare this to other sci-fi, like star trek, that happens in an advanced but static universe. There really aren't any game changing tech coming out through the course of star trek, but happens like 10 times in TBP. You can critique the actual science, but the consequences for each technology felt impactful.

At no point where the human and trisolarians even remotely on even grounds. This is in contrast with many other sci-fi works where aliens things had human equivalents (cars, jewelry, etc.) and they interacted face to face.

Chinese literary convention tends toward less emphasis on the individual and a preference for that which is larger scale. In Chinese literature, putting a lot of emphasis on the internal monologues of characters, expounding on their motivations and detailing the minutiae of events are seen as formal and stylistic faults that make a work tedious.

The highly divergent ideas about narrative and sense of aesthetics can make Chinese literature very difficult to read for us in the west, which is why the most popular ‘translations’ of Chinese literature tend to be abridged adaptations that interpret the spirit of the work rather than the actual contents, this is why Arthur Waley's Monkey: A Folktale of China is by far the most widely known and read version of Journey to the West in the English speaking world and the only people reading actual verbatim translations of the full work by Wu Cheng’en are scholars.

Super Bowl ads are simply a different species in the advertising kingdom. Companies are not just paying for a large audience. They are paying for silent focus: Tens of millions of people quietly watch Super Bowl commercials and actually talk about their favorite moments of corporate branding. They are also paying for exposure: Super Bowl ads are watched and re-watched—on Twitter, on Facebook, on YouTube, and on next-day rankings and analyses across the internet. On most days, readers click out of ads to read articles online. For one day, they read a lot of articles only to click on the ads.

Games—sports—are a form of mass entertainment. They differ from the other principal form of mass entertainment, scripted drama, in three ways that help to account for their appeal. They are spontaneous. Unlike in films and theatrical productions, the outcome is not known in advance: No one bets on the outcome of a play or movie. They are authentic: Unlike film stars, athletes really are doing what audiences see them doing. And games are coherent. Unlike so much of life they have a beginning, middle, and end, with a plot line and a conclusion that can be easily understood.

somebody else in this thread has already commented on married men living longer. It works both ways, too. Each partner keeps tabs on the other, notices problems, encourages them to stick to health resolutions, etc. Plus you both are much less likely to forget things or miss appointments, because the other one is there to say, "Didn't you say..." or "Weren't you going to...?" and so on.

I don’t see myself ready to invest much in something I’m not even sure I want. Also, if it doesn’t work out, I’m scared of leaving a broken heart in another person.

I want to make myself accountable for taking these personal matters more seriously. As a friend told me recently, I should “whole-ass” it, not “half-ass” it, if I want to progress.

I’m not interested in a relationship for its own sake. I could never be with anyone I’m not genuinely interested in, only to have someone and not be alone. I don’t want to compromise or lower my standards to end singledom. I’ve written about perfectionism from a work-related perspective on this blog before. It apparently also applies to my personal life and partner choice.

Content creators chasing engagement, regardless of what kind, to grow their followings happens all the time. And content creators morphing into a weird caricature of themselves much to the chagrin of their audience is pretty normal too.

unlike still-image memes, we still think they must contain some kind of truthfulness to them. And, worse, the more they’re shared, the more we believe it. So when we see a video like the ones Zesu makes — something that appears to be shot out in the world, without any immediately obvious tells that it’s staged, being passed around different platforms — we continue to share it as if it were real. And smart creators, like Zesu, or the porn star with the fake podcast, are taking advantage of that as a growth hack. But it’s also hard not to think that this is, at a macro level, making social media a more annoying place to be.

Not only are ads present on every physical surface you can imagine, they are also on every digital surface. Websites have ads, the most popular apps in the world are made by advertising companies, and many of the accounts people follow are walking billboards.

The race for the streamers to configure themselves as full-service production, distribution, and exhibition outlets has intensified the need for each to articulate a more specific brand identity.

What we are seeing with the streaming wars is not the emergence of a cluster of copy-cat services, with everyone trying to do everything, but the beginnings of a legible strategy to carve up the mediascape and compete for peoples’ waking hours.

Netflix’s penchant for character-centered stories with a three-act structure, as well as high production values (an average of $20–$50-plus million for award contenders), resonates with the “quality” features of the Classical era.

rom early on, Netflix cultivated a liberal public image, which has propelled its investment in social documentary and also driven some of its inclusivity initiatives and collaborations with global auteurs and showrunners of color, such as Alfonso Cuarón, Ava DuVernay, Spike Lee, and Justin Simien.

Quibi as short for “Quick Bites.” In turn, the promos wouldn’t so much emphasize “the what” of the programming as the interest and convenience of being able to watch it while waiting, commuting, or just taking a break. However, this unit of prospective viewing time lies uncomfortably between the ultra-brief TikTok video and the half-hour sitcom.

Peacock’s central obstacle moving forward will be convincing would-be subscribers that the things they loved about linear broadcast and cable TV are worth the investment.

One of the most intriguing and revealing of metaphors, however, isn’t so much related to war as celestial coexistence of streamer-planets within the “universe.” Certainly, the term resonates with key franchises, such as the “Marvel Cinematic Universe,” and the bevvy of intricate stories that such an expansive environment makes possible. This language stakes a claim for the totality of media — that there are no other kinds of moving images beyond what exists on, or what can be imagined for, these select platforms.

And there’s some toothy poignancy to the fact that the Roy children spend what will turn out to be their final moments with their father taunting him for his inability to apologize, and that his last words to them as a group are “I love you, but you are not serious people.”

No amount of money or power or connections can undo what has already happened, nor give Logan Roy’s children one more chance to set things right with their late father. Their grief and shock at the sudden loss seems compounded by the sudden-onset realization that their relationship with their father will now always be what it is in that moment. There will be no more fixing, no further rounds of negotiation. The deal is done.

You know, somebody said, would you ever want to play Donald Trump, I may have told you this before, and I said, well, no. Because I think it’s such a bad script, the Donald Trump script. But then I look at Donald Trump, and I think, God, he’s so lost. He’s just a lost individual, and he’s so full of shit, and the reason he’s full of shit is that he’s an abused child. He’s really an abused child, Donald Trump. A tragic figure. Even though a lot of these very right-wing individuals are repellant, ironically, from the actor’s point of view, when the actor gets into the skin of these guys, you begin to understand where they’re coming from.