April 26, 2021
After a year in which hardly anyone went to the movies, the Oscars made a perplexing decision to not show off its nominated films and performers. It was the award show’s biggest blunder in recent memory (and there have been many.)
The 93rd Academy Awards aired on ABC in the US last night.
Nomadland, a drama about itinerant workers traveling the American West, won best picture. Its director, Chloe Zhao, became the first Asian woman to win the top directing prize. Welsh legend Anthony Hopkins won his second Oscar for his performance of an elderly man with dementia in
April 22, 2021
The nerdiest gig in Hollywood is also one of its most coveted. Actors, athletes, journalists, and TV personalities are lining up to be the next host of
Jeopardy! And some of them are publicly lobbying for the position.
Jeopardy!, the iconic US quiz show, announced a final round of guest hosts before it chooses a permanent replacement for Alex Trebek, the beloved frontman who hosted
Jeopardy! from 1984 until his death in November from pancreatic cancer. Trebek’s final show aired in January, and since then
Jeopardy! has brought in a revolving door of celebrity hosts, including journalist Katie Couric and Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers. The idea is that this will function as a tryout of sorts for the permanent job, which will be decided prior to the show’s 38th season later this year.
We’ve seen this twisted ritual too many times recently.
Restaurants, bars, and shops across the US once again boarded up their windows and doors, bracing for mass upheavals following the trial of Derek Chauvin. As the former Minneapolis police officer was convicted on all charges for the murder of George Floyd last night, many establishments kept their plywood shields in place, anticipating street celebrations and demonstrations this week. More than a nuisance, seeing storefronts poised for violence has a profound effect on our mental health and social relations.
Learning from the widespread looting and vandalism that occurred in June, as protests over Floyd’s murder came to a boiling point, businesses have been preemptively covering their façades. In New York City, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Chicago hundreds of miles from Minneapolis courtroom where the trial was held establishments erected the now all-too-familiar plywood shields to protect their property. Stores
The US has always relied heavily on private insurance to cover its citizens.
As of 2019, roughly two thirds of Americans with healthcare (about 90% of the population) got it through a private company. The remaining third used public coverage like Medicare, Medicaid, and tax credits for private insurance through the Affordable Care Act. It’s not a perfect system by a long stretch: Even those with insurance encounter debilitating medical bills due to the exorbitant, variable costs of healthcare from provider to provider, and it misses a full 26 million people, who remain completely uninsured.
But the Covid-19 pandemic cracked the door for a new kind of federal involvement. The US government sprang into action to create a system where, at least for Covid-19, people could access tests and vaccines for free, with hospital visits heavily subsidized by the government for the uninsured. It was a scaled-down version of something that for decades has been a third rail in American politics:
April 16, 2021
Amazon Studios is risking a lot on its upcoming Lord of the Rings series. But there’s another entity that wants the TV show to be a success even more than Amazon: the government of New Zealand.
New Zealand is granting Amazon a NZ$160 million ($114 million) taxpayer-funded subsidy to film the first season of the company’s Lord of the Rings series there, Radio New Zealand (RNZ) reported yesterday. The subsidy is part of a broad agreement between New Zealand and Amazon designed to leverage the fantasy production to boost New Zealand’s economy over the span of a decade.