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shadowkatAlso, and this is important, that do not make my blood pressure go up or make me want to scream at people.
1. Pixar released a Short Film about a Pittbull befriending a Stray Cat -- this is why I can't most cartoons any more, Pixar and Anime have ruined me for life.
The animation in this is...beautiful and so well done.
2. We Used to Be Friends: Veronica Mars -- essay on Veronica Mars series.
A rain-slicked parking lot at night; the darkness is barely lifted by pink neon lights overhanging empty balconies. The Camelot Motel, a name recalling the chessboard observation from the opening chapter of The Big Sleep: “Knights had no meaning in this game. It wasn’t a game for knights.” Inside one of the rooms, a man and a woman do what people come to cheap motels to do. We hear a voice: “I’m never getting married. You want an absolute? Well, there it is.” The voice is wry, cool, with a hint of preemptive defiance that suggests the speaker knows how people react to such a proclamation from someone young and female, and just enough bitterness to show she means it. It belongs to a girl in her car making 40 bucks an hour, a girl with a calc test and a camera and enough memories of scenes like this to have soured long ago on the happy ending. Her face is tired, impassive, watchful but only professionally so. She introduces herself: “Veronica Mars—spinster.”
Veronica Mars is more than a show about a precocious private eye reviewing integrals while waiting for the money shot. And Veronica herself is more than the jaded teenager we meet here. But this is the Veronica I love the most: her competence, her cynicism, her understanding that life’s only guarantee is disappointment. A girl alone, doing what she needs to do to get by.
*
That precise Veronica never made it to air. Filmed as the opening to the show’s pilot episode, the scene was axed by UPN execs convinced that it would confuse the target demo; it was added back in on the first season’s DVD release. The Veronica Mars (Kristen Bell) introduced to viewers fit more comfortably at first glance into the mold of a spunky teen heroine: a high school student, smart and alienated, ever-ready with a quip or a comeback, thrillingly indifferent to the opinion of her peers. But even with the delay in revealing her extracurricular activities, the show wasted little time establishing its noir grounding. The hallmarks of noir, after all, include the rules which govern the world of the text. And in deceptively sunny Neptune, California, Veronica Mars gave us a town to rival Dashiell Hammett’s Poisonville as a portrait of the corruption and violence at capitalism’s dark rotted heart.
In some ways the show’s class politics—eat the rich and trust no cops—are classic noir, a genre which almost can’t help suggesting ideas about the connection between exploitation and wealth (“All films about crime are about capitalism,” explains Abraham Polonsky in the documentary Red Hollywood, “because capitalism is about crime”). But it expresses this attitude in formulations that feel startlingly current for a show which aired the entirety of its original run before the 2008 financial crash. Veronica introduces Neptune as “a town without a middle class,” a description that increasingly fits the country at large; her neat division of the town’s families into millionaires and those who work for them anticipates the discourse about the one percent. Fredric Jameson, in his study of Raymond Chandler, argues that his social content feels ahead of its time because the Los Angeles he lived in already embodied the social fracturing that would soon define the rest of the country. Perhaps, then, Neptune feels startlingly modern because it is no generic beach town, but an example of the type of city in which the new century was being shaped: a tech-boom beneficiary, Silicon Valley with oceanside views.
If many of the films which make up the film noir canon can be read as expressing American anxieties about the growing postwar bureaucracy, Veronica Mars stands now as an early 21st-century glimpse of the techno-fears which have come to dominate our national consciousness. Although Veronica goes to school with the children of movie stars and ambassadors, one figure dominates the rest: software billionaire Jake Kane. He employs many of the town’s families and created much of their wealth; in keeping with the show’s view of economic power, it’s revealed that he cheated his own employee out of the patent that sent Kane Software stratospheric. That invention was streaming video, an incisive choice which felt timely when the show debuted, six months before the creation of YouTube, and still resonates, as streaming video threads through conversations on topics ranging from the changing media ecosystem to the radicalized young men of the far right. While no one in Veronica Mars puts it to use at quite such a scale, the show explores the capacity of Neptune’s golden goose to invade and harm. When Jake Kane’s daughter is murdered, the gruesome crime scene footage leaks, thanks to her own father’s invention.
The murder of Lilly Kane (Amanda Seyfried)—daughter of power, Veronica’s best friend—is the mystery at the heart of the show’s first season. Her body, beautiful but for the bloodied mess at the edge of her face, is found by the family swimming pool. In a television context, the location most obviously echoes the riverbank discovery of Laura Palmer’s body in Twin Peaks, which Alice Bolin identified as the seminal Dead Girl show from which all others, Veronica Mars included, have spawned. Looking back further, we can tie it to two other violent poolside deaths: Gatsby’s murder in Fitzgerald’s novel and the sinking corpse which bookends Sunset Boulevard. These are texts which share some of the show’s key fascinations: questions of power and access, of the power of the image, of the glamor of luxury and the corruption that underlies it—of, fine, the mirage known as the American Dream. The swimming pool is equal parts artificial and elemental, highlighting both the private riches that enabled its construction and the inescapable physical reality of the blonde corpse no amount of money could protect.
Lilly’s death is the origin story of Veronica herself, the catastrophe which precipitates others: the ouster of her father from his position as sheriff after he publicly accuses the Kane family; his replacement by an incompetent crook; the departure of Veronica’s mother. Lilly’s death turns Veronica into a social pariah after she stands by her father, leaving her isolated and friendless at a party where she is drugged and raped; it forces her to become a crusader for justice, willing to blur ethical lines in search of the truth; it teaches her to expect nothing but betrayal. It changes her. It makes her hard.
3. Indian Village plants 111 trees everytime a girl is born
Typically in Asian cultures, the birth of a girl is considered an unfortunate responsibility because of the dowry system that puts a financial burden on the parents. For this reason, daughters were never as celebrated as sons.
But in one village in India, the residents honor the birth of a daughter with a unique ritual of planting one hundred and eleven fruit trees.
The number 111 in Indian culture is believed to bring success—and that’s exactly the sentiment on which the practice was founded.
Through this tradition, every time a girl is born, the people of Piplantri, Rajasthan, combat the historical prejudice against daughters and beautify their homeland at the same time.
The village’s former leader, Shyam Sundar Palawal, first started the practice in 2006 to honor the death of his daughter Kiran.
4. The Unmistakable Black Roots of the Television Series Sesame Street
Forty years ago, upon the tenth anniversary of the debut of “Sesame Street,” the New York Times offered an appraisal of the revolutionary children’s television program, reminding readers that the show with universal appeal initially declared its target audience, “the four-year old inner-city black youngster.” This year, as the show commemorates its 50th anniversary and is broadcast in more than 150 countries, it’s worthwhile to take a look back at how since its inception, “Sesame Street” has been rooted in African-American culture, more specifically the historically black community of Harlem. The New York City neighborhood played such an outsized role in the development of the program—from set design to casting and marketing—the answer to the question from the “Sesame Street” opening song, “Can you tell me how to get to Sesame Street,” ought to be Duke Ellington’s “Take the A Train.”
“Sesame Street” arose from the Lyndon B. Johnson administration’s Great Society agenda, a series of federal programs that carried the ambitious goal of eliminating poverty and racial injustice. As part of these aspirations, Johnson, who had taught poor Mexican-American children while a student in college, created Head Start in 1965, seeking to disrupt the multi-generational cycle of poverty through early education programs for disadvantaged preschool children.
Joan Ganz Cooney, the creator of “Sesame Street,” said in a 1998 interview that a documentary she produced on the Harlem pre-school program that would become Head Start led her to “become absolutely involved intellectually and spiritually with the Civil Rights Movement and with the educational deficit that poverty created.” Soon thereafter, she teamed up with her friend Lloyd Morrisett, a psychologist and Carnegie Corporation executive, who was looking to back a pre-school education model that could reach a great number of inner-city children. Morrisett secured additional private sector and federal government support, and the Children’s Television Workshop (CTW), the entity that would produce “Sesame Street” among other beloved educational programming, was born.
The CTW, which was renamed Sesame Workshop in 2000, was not simply a production company of writers, directors and producers. A board of experts from the diverse fields of education, child development, psychology, medicine, the social sciences, the arts, and advertising advised Cooney and her team on its work, which placed a premium on the inclusion of black perspectives. A January 1970 Ebony profile of “Sesame Street” included a photo of Cooney flanked by a team of African-American women, including the head of Seattle Head Start and the headmistress of a New York preschool. Chester Pierce, an African-American psychiatrist and Harvard professor, helped design what he called the show’s “hidden curriculum” to build up the self-worth of black children through the presentation of positive black images. Pierce also insisted the show present an integrated, harmonious community to challenge the marginalization of African-Americans that children routinely saw on television and elsewhere in society.
"Sesame Street" was intentional in making its cast racially diverse and its fictional neighborhood integrated. (Hulton Archive via Getty Images)
“Sesame Street” cast member Loretta Long, who played Susan from the show’s first episode through today, devoted a full chapter of her doctoral dissertation to Pierce’s curriculum, which included “locating the show in an inner city neighborhood with old brownstones and lots of trashcans.” Such a setting, the producers concluded, would help “the inner city child relate more to us [cast members] as his neighbors.”
Interesting. I grew up watching Sesame Street (which started when I was a small child) and Mr. Rogers Nieghborhood. Both had a profound affect on my development as a child.
5. Uhm...this link admittedly isn't as feel good as the rest, but what the hell.
Best Streaming Services for You: A Comparison Guide -- or how to choose a streaming service.
LookingLooking at the apps on my Roku TV marketplace — Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, HBO Now, Apple TV Plus, and Crunchyroll, just to name a few — I’m overwhelmed at the veritable avalanche of streaming services available to me. Disney Plus is under a week away, while HBO Max and NBC’s Peacock are not far behind. The streaming wars, ushered in by an era of Peak TV, are in full effect.
No one can watch everything; money and time are finite resources, after all. To make it a little easier on you (and your wallet), we here at Polygon broke down nearly every streaming service — how much it costs, what to watch, and who should subscribe — from the big guys like Netflix to niche collections like Mubi.
A word of advice: If you’re going to take advantage of a free trial to binge a show on a service you’re otherwise uninterested in (which you should! it’s free!), set a reminder on your phone or smart home device to cancel before the trial ends. Companies are counting on you to forget about it.
Netflix vs. Amazon vs. Hulu vs. Disney vs. Apple Plus
For a few years now, Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Hulu have been the standard-bearers for streaming. Netflix is the O.G., Hulu’s got the most current shows, and, well, Amazon is Amazon. But while Disney CEO Bob Iger has explicitly stated that Disney Plus won’t compete with Netflix in terms of volume, a Disney streaming service is disruptive enough to consider it one of the big guys. Ditto for Apple TV Plus, for which Apple threw massive amounts of production money behind tentpole series. So let’s break down the Big Five.
Amazon Prime Video
In addition to free one-day shipping, discounts at Whole Foods, and exclusive Twitch benefits, one of the biggest Amazon Prime perks is access to the company’s streaming service. Amazon Prime Video offers a massive library of free content for subscribers, including original TV shows and movies alongside licensed properties.
Amazon Video is one of the few video-on-demand platforms to offer other streaming services as add-ons. With Amazon Channels, Prime members can subscribe to services like HBO or Shudder without leaving the Amazon Video app. Notably, though, its biggest competitors — Hulu and Netflix — aren’t available via Amazon Channels ... yet.
What it costs: $119/year; $12.99/month (30-day free trial)
Who should subscribe: Amazon shoppers
What to watch: Fleabag, Catastrophe, Too Old to Die Young, Good Omens, anime
When to cancel: when the cost of other Prime perks outweighs the benefits
Apple TV Plus
Unlike Hulu or Netflix, Apple isn’t licensing third-party content for Apple TV Plus. At least at launch, Apple TV Plus is solely a hub for Apple’s own original programming. Structurally, it’s closer to a premium over-the-top add-on like HBO Now than a major platform like Amazon. Still, Apple brings a signature Silicon Valley polish — not to mention heaps of money — to its impressive roster, which includes big names like Steven Spielberg, J.J. Abrams, Jennifer Aniston, and Oprah.
What it costs: $4.99/month (seven-day free trial; 12-month free trial with purchase of a new iPhone, iPad, Mac, or Apple TV)
Who should subscribe: new iPhone owners (and Peak TV completionists)
What to watch: Dickinson, The Elephant Queen, and eventually Amazing Stories and Mythic Quest
When to cancel: if/when programming doesn’t live up to the hype
Disney Plus
Disney Plus, which launches on Nov. 12, will offer original programming like the Star Wars spinoff The Mandalorian and High School Musical: The Musical: The Series, but its biggest draw is Disney’s back catalog. More than anything, Disney Plus is proof that Disney owns a mind-numbing collection of IP. A Twitter thread detailing every movie and TV show in the Disney Plus library ran more than 600 tweets long — and that’s just for the day-one content.
What it costs: $69.99/year; $6.99/month (seven-day free trial)
Who should subscribe: fans of Disney or Marvel or Pixar or Star Wars or The Simpsons or National Geographic ...
What to watch: The Mandalorian, obscure Disney movies, Disney Channel classics
When to cancel: when Disney stops churning out zeitgeist-commanding content (so, probably never)
Hulu
Of the major streaming services, Hulu is the best option for cord-cutters who want to keep up with current TV shows. NBC, Fox, and some cable networks drop episodes onto the platform the day after they air, which means you don’t have to wait for an entire season to be released on Amazon or Netflix before catching up with your favorite series. That’s in addition to plenty of original programming, licensed content, and premium cable add-ons.
[Note: Hulu also offers a live TV option, which is detailed in the Live TV section below.]
What it costs: $5.99/month ad-supported; $11.99/month ad-free (30-day free trial)
Who should subscribe: recovering DVR hoarders
What to watch: Shrill, PEN15, Looking for Alaska, currently running network shows
When to cancel: if your must-watch network shows aren’t keeping you coming back
The Xerox of streaming services, Netflix has been able to stay top dog (or at least one of a small litter of top dogs) through a combination of churning out original content and buying up the rights to hugely popular licensed properties like Friends and The Office. Now that much of that third-party IP is leaving the platform for various streaming services, Netflix will likely double down on its originals, as well as continue to look abroad for licensing opportunities — foreign reality shows like The Great British Baking Show and Terrace House seem to be a rich vein.
What it costs: $8.99/month for Basic; $12.99/month for Standard; $15.99/month for Premium (30-day free trial)
Who should subscribe: TV bingers
What to watch: Stranger Things, American Vandal, I Think You Should Leave, Grace and Frankie, Aggretsuko, Terrace House, The Great British Baking Show, The Witcher
When to cancel: When you’ve binged all you can binge or the output feels like overload
Quibbles? They got the pricing wrong on some of these. Netflix costs me about 11.95 a month for HD.
And Amazon was $99 a year. So they must have increased it?
6. The Day We Realized Our Parents Were Russian Spies -- for fans of the television serial "The Americans" -- apparently it was based on fact.
But the FBI had not made a mistake, and the truth was so outlandish, it defied comprehension. Not only were their parents indeed Russian spies, they were Russians. The man and woman the boys knew as Mom and Dad really were their parents, but their names were not Donald Heathfield and Tracey Foley. Those were Canadians who had died long ago, as children; their identities had been stolen and adopted by the boys’ parents.
Their real names were Andrei Bezrukov and Elena Vavilova. They were both born in the Soviet Union, had undergone training in the KGB and been dispatched abroad as part of a Soviet programme of deep-cover secret agents, known in Russia as the “illegals”. After a slow-burning career building up an ordinary North American background, the pair were now active agents for the SVR, the foreign spy agency of modern Russia and a successor to the KGB. They, along with eight other agents, had been betrayed by a Russian spy who had defected to the Americans.
The FBI indictment detailing their misdeeds was a catalogue of espionage cliches: dead drops, brush-pasts, coded messages and plastic bags stuffed with crisp dollar bills. The footage of a plane carrying the 10 touching down at Vienna airport, to be swapped for four Russians who had been held in Russian prisons on charges of spying for the west, brought back memories of the cold war. The media had a field day with the Bond-girl looks of 28-year-old Anna Chapman, one of two Russians arrested not to have pretended to be of western origin; she worked as an international estate agent in Manhattan. Russia didn’t know whether to be embarrassed or emboldened: its agents had been busted, but what other country would think of mounting such a complex, slow-drip espionage operation in the first place?
For Alex and Tim, the geopolitics behind the spy swap was the least of their worries. The pair had grown up as ordinary Canadians, and now discovered they were the children of Russian spies. Ahead of them was a long flight to Moscow, and an even longer emotional and psychological journey.
Only posting this for The Americans fans out there. You know who you are.
7. The Science of Sleep Dreaming Depression and How REM Sleep Regulates Negative Emotions
Cartwright spent nearly three decades investigating “how a mood disorder that affects cognition, motivation, and most of all the emotional state during waking shows itself in dreams.” What proved particularly difficult was understanding the basis for this poor dream recall during REM sleep, since anti-depressants suppress that stage of the sleep cycle, but early research suggested that this very suppression of REM might be the mechanism responsible for reinvigorating the depressed.
This brings us to the regulatory purpose of dreaming. Cartwright explains:
Despite differences in terminology, all the contemporary theories of dreaming have a common thread — they all emphasize that dreams are not about prosaic themes, not about reading, writing, and arithmetic, but about emotion, or what psychologists refer to as affect. What is carried forward from waking hours into sleep are recent experiences that have an emotional component, often those that were negative in tone but not noticed at the time or not fully resolved. One proposed purpose of dreaming, of what dreaming accomplishes (known as the mood regulatory function of dreams theory) is that dreaming modulates disturbances in emotion, regulating those that are troublesome. My research, as well as that of other investigators in this country and abroad, supports this theory. Studies show that negative mood is down-regulated overnight. How this is accomplished has had less attention.
I propose that when some disturbing waking experience is reactivated in sleep and carried forward into REM, where it is matched by similarity in feeling to earlier memories, a network of older associations is stimulated and is displayed as a sequence of compound images that we experience as dreams. This melding of new and old memory fragments modifies the network of emotional self-defining memories, and thus updates the organizational picture we hold of ‘who I am and what is good for me and what is not.’ In this way, dreaming diffuses the emotional charge of the event and so prepares the sleeper to wake ready to see things in a more positive light, to make a fresh start. This does not always happen over a single night; sometimes a big reorganization of the emotional perspective of our self-concept must be made — from wife to widow or married to single, say, and this may take many nights. We must look for dream changes within the night and over time across nights to detect whether a productive change is under way. In very broad strokes, this is the definition of the mood-regulatory function of dreaming, one basic to the new model of the twenty-four hour mind I am proposing.
Towards the end of the book, Cartwright explores the role of sleep and dreaming in consolidating what we call “the self,” with another admonition against memory’s self-editing capacity:
[In] good sleepers, the mind is continuously active, reviewing experience from yesterday, sorting which new information is relevant and important to save due to its emotional saliency. Dreams are not without sense, nor are they best understood to be expressions of infantile wishes. They are the result of the interconnectedness of new experience with that already stored in memory networks. But memory is never a precise duplicate of the original; instead, it is a continuing act of creation. Dream images are the product of that creation. They are formed by pattern recognition between some current emotionally valued experience matching the condensed representation of similarly toned memories. Networks of these become our familiar style of thinking, which gives our behavior continuity and us a coherent sense of who we are. Thus, dream dimensions are elements of the schemas, and both represent accumulated experience and serve to filter and evaluate the new day’s input.
Sleep is a busy time, interweaving streams of thought with emotional values attached, as they fit or challenge the organizational structure that represents our identity. One function of all this action, I believe, is to regulate disturbing emotion in order to keep it from disrupting our sleep and subsequent waking functioning.
[Sigh, I need to have better dreams.]
8. What Happens After a Whale Dies
Not what I thought, at all.
What happens after a whale dies? Most fall.
Their carcasses — known as "whale falls" — become an energy-rich habitat, drawing a wide variety of organisms from across the deep sea to feast. Whale falls become ecosystems unto themselves. Even cooler?
Whale falls are places of evolutionary novelty, sheltering species first discovered on the bones of dead whales. These species have adapted to live in the extreme environment of the deep sea: a cold region of immense pressure and intense darkness.
Down there, most creatures subsist on dead and decaying material that falls from the surface, forming "marine snow" — dead plankton, dead animals shells, fecal matter, and other inorganic material. But every so often, something larger reaches the sea floor.
Diva Amon, a deep-sea biologist and the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow at the Natural History Museum in London, likens the arrival of a whale fall to a Thanksgiving buffet.
"Like your family coming from all over the country for these events, different species come from all over the deep sea to feast on this huge amount of carbon that has just arrived," she says.
Whale-fall ecosystems were first studied in 1988 by a team of researchers at the University of Hawaiʻ i, led by Craig Smith. Smith and Amanda Demopoulos later estimated that the sedimentation of a decomposing 40-ton whale carcass can be the equivalent of two thousand years worth of normal background carbon, that falls as marine snow, over a 50 square meter area. In short, a whale fall is a food boon in this typically nutrient-poor region of the ocean.
1. Pixar released a Short Film about a Pittbull befriending a Stray Cat -- this is why I can't most cartoons any more, Pixar and Anime have ruined me for life.
The animation in this is...beautiful and so well done.
2. We Used to Be Friends: Veronica Mars -- essay on Veronica Mars series.
A rain-slicked parking lot at night; the darkness is barely lifted by pink neon lights overhanging empty balconies. The Camelot Motel, a name recalling the chessboard observation from the opening chapter of The Big Sleep: “Knights had no meaning in this game. It wasn’t a game for knights.” Inside one of the rooms, a man and a woman do what people come to cheap motels to do. We hear a voice: “I’m never getting married. You want an absolute? Well, there it is.” The voice is wry, cool, with a hint of preemptive defiance that suggests the speaker knows how people react to such a proclamation from someone young and female, and just enough bitterness to show she means it. It belongs to a girl in her car making 40 bucks an hour, a girl with a calc test and a camera and enough memories of scenes like this to have soured long ago on the happy ending. Her face is tired, impassive, watchful but only professionally so. She introduces herself: “Veronica Mars—spinster.”
Veronica Mars is more than a show about a precocious private eye reviewing integrals while waiting for the money shot. And Veronica herself is more than the jaded teenager we meet here. But this is the Veronica I love the most: her competence, her cynicism, her understanding that life’s only guarantee is disappointment. A girl alone, doing what she needs to do to get by.
*
That precise Veronica never made it to air. Filmed as the opening to the show’s pilot episode, the scene was axed by UPN execs convinced that it would confuse the target demo; it was added back in on the first season’s DVD release. The Veronica Mars (Kristen Bell) introduced to viewers fit more comfortably at first glance into the mold of a spunky teen heroine: a high school student, smart and alienated, ever-ready with a quip or a comeback, thrillingly indifferent to the opinion of her peers. But even with the delay in revealing her extracurricular activities, the show wasted little time establishing its noir grounding. The hallmarks of noir, after all, include the rules which govern the world of the text. And in deceptively sunny Neptune, California, Veronica Mars gave us a town to rival Dashiell Hammett’s Poisonville as a portrait of the corruption and violence at capitalism’s dark rotted heart.
In some ways the show’s class politics—eat the rich and trust no cops—are classic noir, a genre which almost can’t help suggesting ideas about the connection between exploitation and wealth (“All films about crime are about capitalism,” explains Abraham Polonsky in the documentary Red Hollywood, “because capitalism is about crime”). But it expresses this attitude in formulations that feel startlingly current for a show which aired the entirety of its original run before the 2008 financial crash. Veronica introduces Neptune as “a town without a middle class,” a description that increasingly fits the country at large; her neat division of the town’s families into millionaires and those who work for them anticipates the discourse about the one percent. Fredric Jameson, in his study of Raymond Chandler, argues that his social content feels ahead of its time because the Los Angeles he lived in already embodied the social fracturing that would soon define the rest of the country. Perhaps, then, Neptune feels startlingly modern because it is no generic beach town, but an example of the type of city in which the new century was being shaped: a tech-boom beneficiary, Silicon Valley with oceanside views.
If many of the films which make up the film noir canon can be read as expressing American anxieties about the growing postwar bureaucracy, Veronica Mars stands now as an early 21st-century glimpse of the techno-fears which have come to dominate our national consciousness. Although Veronica goes to school with the children of movie stars and ambassadors, one figure dominates the rest: software billionaire Jake Kane. He employs many of the town’s families and created much of their wealth; in keeping with the show’s view of economic power, it’s revealed that he cheated his own employee out of the patent that sent Kane Software stratospheric. That invention was streaming video, an incisive choice which felt timely when the show debuted, six months before the creation of YouTube, and still resonates, as streaming video threads through conversations on topics ranging from the changing media ecosystem to the radicalized young men of the far right. While no one in Veronica Mars puts it to use at quite such a scale, the show explores the capacity of Neptune’s golden goose to invade and harm. When Jake Kane’s daughter is murdered, the gruesome crime scene footage leaks, thanks to her own father’s invention.
The murder of Lilly Kane (Amanda Seyfried)—daughter of power, Veronica’s best friend—is the mystery at the heart of the show’s first season. Her body, beautiful but for the bloodied mess at the edge of her face, is found by the family swimming pool. In a television context, the location most obviously echoes the riverbank discovery of Laura Palmer’s body in Twin Peaks, which Alice Bolin identified as the seminal Dead Girl show from which all others, Veronica Mars included, have spawned. Looking back further, we can tie it to two other violent poolside deaths: Gatsby’s murder in Fitzgerald’s novel and the sinking corpse which bookends Sunset Boulevard. These are texts which share some of the show’s key fascinations: questions of power and access, of the power of the image, of the glamor of luxury and the corruption that underlies it—of, fine, the mirage known as the American Dream. The swimming pool is equal parts artificial and elemental, highlighting both the private riches that enabled its construction and the inescapable physical reality of the blonde corpse no amount of money could protect.
Lilly’s death is the origin story of Veronica herself, the catastrophe which precipitates others: the ouster of her father from his position as sheriff after he publicly accuses the Kane family; his replacement by an incompetent crook; the departure of Veronica’s mother. Lilly’s death turns Veronica into a social pariah after she stands by her father, leaving her isolated and friendless at a party where she is drugged and raped; it forces her to become a crusader for justice, willing to blur ethical lines in search of the truth; it teaches her to expect nothing but betrayal. It changes her. It makes her hard.
3. Indian Village plants 111 trees everytime a girl is born
Typically in Asian cultures, the birth of a girl is considered an unfortunate responsibility because of the dowry system that puts a financial burden on the parents. For this reason, daughters were never as celebrated as sons.
But in one village in India, the residents honor the birth of a daughter with a unique ritual of planting one hundred and eleven fruit trees.
The number 111 in Indian culture is believed to bring success—and that’s exactly the sentiment on which the practice was founded.
Through this tradition, every time a girl is born, the people of Piplantri, Rajasthan, combat the historical prejudice against daughters and beautify their homeland at the same time.
The village’s former leader, Shyam Sundar Palawal, first started the practice in 2006 to honor the death of his daughter Kiran.
4. The Unmistakable Black Roots of the Television Series Sesame Street
Forty years ago, upon the tenth anniversary of the debut of “Sesame Street,” the New York Times offered an appraisal of the revolutionary children’s television program, reminding readers that the show with universal appeal initially declared its target audience, “the four-year old inner-city black youngster.” This year, as the show commemorates its 50th anniversary and is broadcast in more than 150 countries, it’s worthwhile to take a look back at how since its inception, “Sesame Street” has been rooted in African-American culture, more specifically the historically black community of Harlem. The New York City neighborhood played such an outsized role in the development of the program—from set design to casting and marketing—the answer to the question from the “Sesame Street” opening song, “Can you tell me how to get to Sesame Street,” ought to be Duke Ellington’s “Take the A Train.”
“Sesame Street” arose from the Lyndon B. Johnson administration’s Great Society agenda, a series of federal programs that carried the ambitious goal of eliminating poverty and racial injustice. As part of these aspirations, Johnson, who had taught poor Mexican-American children while a student in college, created Head Start in 1965, seeking to disrupt the multi-generational cycle of poverty through early education programs for disadvantaged preschool children.
Joan Ganz Cooney, the creator of “Sesame Street,” said in a 1998 interview that a documentary she produced on the Harlem pre-school program that would become Head Start led her to “become absolutely involved intellectually and spiritually with the Civil Rights Movement and with the educational deficit that poverty created.” Soon thereafter, she teamed up with her friend Lloyd Morrisett, a psychologist and Carnegie Corporation executive, who was looking to back a pre-school education model that could reach a great number of inner-city children. Morrisett secured additional private sector and federal government support, and the Children’s Television Workshop (CTW), the entity that would produce “Sesame Street” among other beloved educational programming, was born.
The CTW, which was renamed Sesame Workshop in 2000, was not simply a production company of writers, directors and producers. A board of experts from the diverse fields of education, child development, psychology, medicine, the social sciences, the arts, and advertising advised Cooney and her team on its work, which placed a premium on the inclusion of black perspectives. A January 1970 Ebony profile of “Sesame Street” included a photo of Cooney flanked by a team of African-American women, including the head of Seattle Head Start and the headmistress of a New York preschool. Chester Pierce, an African-American psychiatrist and Harvard professor, helped design what he called the show’s “hidden curriculum” to build up the self-worth of black children through the presentation of positive black images. Pierce also insisted the show present an integrated, harmonious community to challenge the marginalization of African-Americans that children routinely saw on television and elsewhere in society.
"Sesame Street" was intentional in making its cast racially diverse and its fictional neighborhood integrated. (Hulton Archive via Getty Images)
“Sesame Street” cast member Loretta Long, who played Susan from the show’s first episode through today, devoted a full chapter of her doctoral dissertation to Pierce’s curriculum, which included “locating the show in an inner city neighborhood with old brownstones and lots of trashcans.” Such a setting, the producers concluded, would help “the inner city child relate more to us [cast members] as his neighbors.”
Interesting. I grew up watching Sesame Street (which started when I was a small child) and Mr. Rogers Nieghborhood. Both had a profound affect on my development as a child.
5. Uhm...this link admittedly isn't as feel good as the rest, but what the hell.
Best Streaming Services for You: A Comparison Guide -- or how to choose a streaming service.
LookingLooking at the apps on my Roku TV marketplace — Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, HBO Now, Apple TV Plus, and Crunchyroll, just to name a few — I’m overwhelmed at the veritable avalanche of streaming services available to me. Disney Plus is under a week away, while HBO Max and NBC’s Peacock are not far behind. The streaming wars, ushered in by an era of Peak TV, are in full effect.
No one can watch everything; money and time are finite resources, after all. To make it a little easier on you (and your wallet), we here at Polygon broke down nearly every streaming service — how much it costs, what to watch, and who should subscribe — from the big guys like Netflix to niche collections like Mubi.
A word of advice: If you’re going to take advantage of a free trial to binge a show on a service you’re otherwise uninterested in (which you should! it’s free!), set a reminder on your phone or smart home device to cancel before the trial ends. Companies are counting on you to forget about it.
Netflix vs. Amazon vs. Hulu vs. Disney vs. Apple Plus
For a few years now, Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Hulu have been the standard-bearers for streaming. Netflix is the O.G., Hulu’s got the most current shows, and, well, Amazon is Amazon. But while Disney CEO Bob Iger has explicitly stated that Disney Plus won’t compete with Netflix in terms of volume, a Disney streaming service is disruptive enough to consider it one of the big guys. Ditto for Apple TV Plus, for which Apple threw massive amounts of production money behind tentpole series. So let’s break down the Big Five.
Amazon Prime Video
In addition to free one-day shipping, discounts at Whole Foods, and exclusive Twitch benefits, one of the biggest Amazon Prime perks is access to the company’s streaming service. Amazon Prime Video offers a massive library of free content for subscribers, including original TV shows and movies alongside licensed properties.
Amazon Video is one of the few video-on-demand platforms to offer other streaming services as add-ons. With Amazon Channels, Prime members can subscribe to services like HBO or Shudder without leaving the Amazon Video app. Notably, though, its biggest competitors — Hulu and Netflix — aren’t available via Amazon Channels ... yet.
What it costs: $119/year; $12.99/month (30-day free trial)
Who should subscribe: Amazon shoppers
What to watch: Fleabag, Catastrophe, Too Old to Die Young, Good Omens, anime
When to cancel: when the cost of other Prime perks outweighs the benefits
Apple TV Plus
Unlike Hulu or Netflix, Apple isn’t licensing third-party content for Apple TV Plus. At least at launch, Apple TV Plus is solely a hub for Apple’s own original programming. Structurally, it’s closer to a premium over-the-top add-on like HBO Now than a major platform like Amazon. Still, Apple brings a signature Silicon Valley polish — not to mention heaps of money — to its impressive roster, which includes big names like Steven Spielberg, J.J. Abrams, Jennifer Aniston, and Oprah.
What it costs: $4.99/month (seven-day free trial; 12-month free trial with purchase of a new iPhone, iPad, Mac, or Apple TV)
Who should subscribe: new iPhone owners (and Peak TV completionists)
What to watch: Dickinson, The Elephant Queen, and eventually Amazing Stories and Mythic Quest
When to cancel: if/when programming doesn’t live up to the hype
Disney Plus
Disney Plus, which launches on Nov. 12, will offer original programming like the Star Wars spinoff The Mandalorian and High School Musical: The Musical: The Series, but its biggest draw is Disney’s back catalog. More than anything, Disney Plus is proof that Disney owns a mind-numbing collection of IP. A Twitter thread detailing every movie and TV show in the Disney Plus library ran more than 600 tweets long — and that’s just for the day-one content.
What it costs: $69.99/year; $6.99/month (seven-day free trial)
Who should subscribe: fans of Disney or Marvel or Pixar or Star Wars or The Simpsons or National Geographic ...
What to watch: The Mandalorian, obscure Disney movies, Disney Channel classics
When to cancel: when Disney stops churning out zeitgeist-commanding content (so, probably never)
Hulu
Of the major streaming services, Hulu is the best option for cord-cutters who want to keep up with current TV shows. NBC, Fox, and some cable networks drop episodes onto the platform the day after they air, which means you don’t have to wait for an entire season to be released on Amazon or Netflix before catching up with your favorite series. That’s in addition to plenty of original programming, licensed content, and premium cable add-ons.
[Note: Hulu also offers a live TV option, which is detailed in the Live TV section below.]
What it costs: $5.99/month ad-supported; $11.99/month ad-free (30-day free trial)
Who should subscribe: recovering DVR hoarders
What to watch: Shrill, PEN15, Looking for Alaska, currently running network shows
When to cancel: if your must-watch network shows aren’t keeping you coming back
The Xerox of streaming services, Netflix has been able to stay top dog (or at least one of a small litter of top dogs) through a combination of churning out original content and buying up the rights to hugely popular licensed properties like Friends and The Office. Now that much of that third-party IP is leaving the platform for various streaming services, Netflix will likely double down on its originals, as well as continue to look abroad for licensing opportunities — foreign reality shows like The Great British Baking Show and Terrace House seem to be a rich vein.
What it costs: $8.99/month for Basic; $12.99/month for Standard; $15.99/month for Premium (30-day free trial)
Who should subscribe: TV bingers
What to watch: Stranger Things, American Vandal, I Think You Should Leave, Grace and Frankie, Aggretsuko, Terrace House, The Great British Baking Show, The Witcher
When to cancel: When you’ve binged all you can binge or the output feels like overload
Quibbles? They got the pricing wrong on some of these. Netflix costs me about 11.95 a month for HD.
And Amazon was $99 a year. So they must have increased it?
6. The Day We Realized Our Parents Were Russian Spies -- for fans of the television serial "The Americans" -- apparently it was based on fact.
But the FBI had not made a mistake, and the truth was so outlandish, it defied comprehension. Not only were their parents indeed Russian spies, they were Russians. The man and woman the boys knew as Mom and Dad really were their parents, but their names were not Donald Heathfield and Tracey Foley. Those were Canadians who had died long ago, as children; their identities had been stolen and adopted by the boys’ parents.
Their real names were Andrei Bezrukov and Elena Vavilova. They were both born in the Soviet Union, had undergone training in the KGB and been dispatched abroad as part of a Soviet programme of deep-cover secret agents, known in Russia as the “illegals”. After a slow-burning career building up an ordinary North American background, the pair were now active agents for the SVR, the foreign spy agency of modern Russia and a successor to the KGB. They, along with eight other agents, had been betrayed by a Russian spy who had defected to the Americans.
The FBI indictment detailing their misdeeds was a catalogue of espionage cliches: dead drops, brush-pasts, coded messages and plastic bags stuffed with crisp dollar bills. The footage of a plane carrying the 10 touching down at Vienna airport, to be swapped for four Russians who had been held in Russian prisons on charges of spying for the west, brought back memories of the cold war. The media had a field day with the Bond-girl looks of 28-year-old Anna Chapman, one of two Russians arrested not to have pretended to be of western origin; she worked as an international estate agent in Manhattan. Russia didn’t know whether to be embarrassed or emboldened: its agents had been busted, but what other country would think of mounting such a complex, slow-drip espionage operation in the first place?
For Alex and Tim, the geopolitics behind the spy swap was the least of their worries. The pair had grown up as ordinary Canadians, and now discovered they were the children of Russian spies. Ahead of them was a long flight to Moscow, and an even longer emotional and psychological journey.
Only posting this for The Americans fans out there. You know who you are.
7. The Science of Sleep Dreaming Depression and How REM Sleep Regulates Negative Emotions
Cartwright spent nearly three decades investigating “how a mood disorder that affects cognition, motivation, and most of all the emotional state during waking shows itself in dreams.” What proved particularly difficult was understanding the basis for this poor dream recall during REM sleep, since anti-depressants suppress that stage of the sleep cycle, but early research suggested that this very suppression of REM might be the mechanism responsible for reinvigorating the depressed.
This brings us to the regulatory purpose of dreaming. Cartwright explains:
Despite differences in terminology, all the contemporary theories of dreaming have a common thread — they all emphasize that dreams are not about prosaic themes, not about reading, writing, and arithmetic, but about emotion, or what psychologists refer to as affect. What is carried forward from waking hours into sleep are recent experiences that have an emotional component, often those that were negative in tone but not noticed at the time or not fully resolved. One proposed purpose of dreaming, of what dreaming accomplishes (known as the mood regulatory function of dreams theory) is that dreaming modulates disturbances in emotion, regulating those that are troublesome. My research, as well as that of other investigators in this country and abroad, supports this theory. Studies show that negative mood is down-regulated overnight. How this is accomplished has had less attention.
I propose that when some disturbing waking experience is reactivated in sleep and carried forward into REM, where it is matched by similarity in feeling to earlier memories, a network of older associations is stimulated and is displayed as a sequence of compound images that we experience as dreams. This melding of new and old memory fragments modifies the network of emotional self-defining memories, and thus updates the organizational picture we hold of ‘who I am and what is good for me and what is not.’ In this way, dreaming diffuses the emotional charge of the event and so prepares the sleeper to wake ready to see things in a more positive light, to make a fresh start. This does not always happen over a single night; sometimes a big reorganization of the emotional perspective of our self-concept must be made — from wife to widow or married to single, say, and this may take many nights. We must look for dream changes within the night and over time across nights to detect whether a productive change is under way. In very broad strokes, this is the definition of the mood-regulatory function of dreaming, one basic to the new model of the twenty-four hour mind I am proposing.
Towards the end of the book, Cartwright explores the role of sleep and dreaming in consolidating what we call “the self,” with another admonition against memory’s self-editing capacity:
[In] good sleepers, the mind is continuously active, reviewing experience from yesterday, sorting which new information is relevant and important to save due to its emotional saliency. Dreams are not without sense, nor are they best understood to be expressions of infantile wishes. They are the result of the interconnectedness of new experience with that already stored in memory networks. But memory is never a precise duplicate of the original; instead, it is a continuing act of creation. Dream images are the product of that creation. They are formed by pattern recognition between some current emotionally valued experience matching the condensed representation of similarly toned memories. Networks of these become our familiar style of thinking, which gives our behavior continuity and us a coherent sense of who we are. Thus, dream dimensions are elements of the schemas, and both represent accumulated experience and serve to filter and evaluate the new day’s input.
Sleep is a busy time, interweaving streams of thought with emotional values attached, as they fit or challenge the organizational structure that represents our identity. One function of all this action, I believe, is to regulate disturbing emotion in order to keep it from disrupting our sleep and subsequent waking functioning.
[Sigh, I need to have better dreams.]
8. What Happens After a Whale Dies
Not what I thought, at all.
What happens after a whale dies? Most fall.
Their carcasses — known as "whale falls" — become an energy-rich habitat, drawing a wide variety of organisms from across the deep sea to feast. Whale falls become ecosystems unto themselves. Even cooler?
Whale falls are places of evolutionary novelty, sheltering species first discovered on the bones of dead whales. These species have adapted to live in the extreme environment of the deep sea: a cold region of immense pressure and intense darkness.
Down there, most creatures subsist on dead and decaying material that falls from the surface, forming "marine snow" — dead plankton, dead animals shells, fecal matter, and other inorganic material. But every so often, something larger reaches the sea floor.
Diva Amon, a deep-sea biologist and the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow at the Natural History Museum in London, likens the arrival of a whale fall to a Thanksgiving buffet.
"Like your family coming from all over the country for these events, different species come from all over the deep sea to feast on this huge amount of carbon that has just arrived," she says.
Whale-fall ecosystems were first studied in 1988 by a team of researchers at the University of Hawaiʻ i, led by Craig Smith. Smith and Amanda Demopoulos later estimated that the sedimentation of a decomposing 40-ton whale carcass can be the equivalent of two thousand years worth of normal background carbon, that falls as marine snow, over a 50 square meter area. In short, a whale fall is a food boon in this typically nutrient-poor region of the ocean.