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When I set out to create my award-winning prestige drama The Family, I wanted to test the boundaries of what television could be. I already knew I wanted to push the envelope by hinting at incest, having every other word of dialogue be “fuck,” and showing a character die in a gruesome manner five minutes into the first episode. Yet this didn’t feel like enough. That’s when I realized that I shouldn’t just push the envelope; I needed to flush the envelope down the toilet.

The Family was inspired by three literary masterpieces: William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, and Tarō Gomi’s quintessential contribution to the canon, Everyone Poops. Some critics have called the bathroom scenes in my masterpiece “gratuitous” and “weirdly and unnecessarily recurring.” But my characters are human. They cry when they are hurt, they bleed when they are cut, and they need to evacuate their bowels after eating a big burrito. By shoehorning toilet-themed tableaux into every episode of The Family, I am representing the beauty and depravity of the human experience.

Time is a scarce resource on television. However, if one still — as is so often the case nowadays — uses precious airtime for trivial matters and meaningless ‘entertainment,’ there must be a reason. Television is — still — for a large part of the population one of the primary sources of information and worldview. […]

The Conservative Party's defence of their donor Frank Hester, who made racist comments about Diane Abbott and black women, reveals the double standards at the heart of Rishi Sunak's anti-extremism plans, reports Adam Bienkov

The rich and powerful tradition of anti-racist struggles against white power structures in the Caribbean is something the Windrush generation — people like my grandfather, and the community around him — brought with them when they migrated to Britain after World War Two. When they arrived, many of those communities found a political home in […]

Psychotherapists have long believed it’s a bad idea to suppress worrisome thoughts, but new research is prompting a rethink

- by Shayla Love

Read at Psyche

To understand the terrifying futures unleashed by nuclear weapons, we urgently need to return to the deep past

- by Maria Stavrinaki

Read at Aeon

What if the Brigadier from Doctor Who was involved with a Hammer Horror film, undercover, and enlisted the help of the actor Jon Pertwee?

An analysis suggests that the hours that male workers spend on the job over a career is associated with both higher lifetime earnings and higher earnings growth.

David Rule and Iain de Weymarn Technologies such as distributed ledgers create the possibility of new forms of digital money, whether privately-issued ‘stable coins’, tokenised commercial bank deposits, or central bank digital currencies. Authorities are considering a world where digital money circulates alongside existing forms of money. In the past, the nature of money has often changed. Prior … Continue reading New money, old money →

A state effort to outlaw workplace heat-protection standards is a preview of what will happen as the GOP’s war on workers collides with our climate reality.

Here’s that interview with the former Trump employee. It’s a doozy: It’s only Monday…

Mary Kostakidis and Quentin Dempster explore the Australian mainstream media’s blind eyes on the humanitarian catastrophe now unfolding in Gaza. This vodcast was recorded on March 11 2024 following the referral of the Australian Government to the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice’s conditional ruling on South Africa’s submitted evidence of IDF Continue reading »

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Source - Patreon

Source - Patreon

Source - Patreon

Scanning animal patterns like bar codes boosts conservation.

The post How AI Can Save the Zebras appeared first on Nautilus.

Trump’s ally Orban spells out Trump’s Ukraine plan Not that we didn’t know this was his plan to “end the war in 24 hours,” but it’s now been confirmed. He will hand Ukraine to Vladimir Putin and leave Europe to its own devices: Donald Trump will totally stop funding Ukraine if he wins the U.S. election in November, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said following a meeting between the right-wing figureheads. “He will not give a penny in the Ukraine-Russia war,” Orbán told Hungarian state media Sunday. “Therefore, the war will end, because it is obvious that Ukraine can not stand on its own feet.” The longtime allies met last Friday at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, a summit which was lambasted by U.S. President Joe Biden.

You don’t have to imagine it: The list goes on. Lara is going to be a rich source of MAGA BS, isn’t she?

In the classroom, the boardroom, and at the speaker’s dais, the former chair of the joint chiefs cashes in.

The post Gen. Mark Milley’s Second Act: Multimillionaire appeared first on The Intercept.

They held their breath until they turned blue and nothing happened Awwwwww: House conservatives are furious about the government funding bill negotiated by Speaker Mike Johnson that sailed through Congress last week, calling it a betrayal of Republican promises to cut spending and reshape the federal budget. But in a twist, this time they aren’t threatening to overthrow the man in charge of cutting those funding deals with a Democratic-led Senate and White House, even as they’ve begun to paint him as a functionary for status quo policies. House Freedom Caucus Chair Bob Good, R-Va., has blasted the first of two funding packages and said he doesn’t expect a better deal in the second one, which must pass by March 22 to avoid a partial government shutdown. “Because the speaker doesn’t want to do that. He just wants to pass what the Senate wants so that we avoid any conflict,” Good told NBC News, saying that Johnson, R-La., wants to “join hands with the Dems” to “increase spending” and yield “no policy wins.” “The speaker is unwilling to tell the Senate no,” he said.