“The Library of Congress announced on Wednesday the results of a survey that found that 70 percent of the feature-length films made in the United States during the silent era have been lost. The reasons range from the natural deterioration over time of highly flammable nitrate film stock to outright neglect.”
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The Federal Trade Commission, charged with protecting consumers and guarding against deceptive advertising practices, acknowledges it does not know.
But faced with a growing wave of digital advertising that is intended to look like the news articles and features of the publications where they appear, the commission is warning advertisers that it intends to vigorously enforce its rules against misleading advertising.
The practice of what is now known as native advertising or sponsored content — and has been referred to as advertorial or infomercial — has grown more aggressive on the Internet. That is because companies and brands have the ability to target specific audiences and individuals and to get instant feedback when consumers react to what is being shown.
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A study by the New America Foundation recently found that only 13 percent of U.Va.’s students qualify for Pell Grants, federal scholarships for poor students. By comparison, approximately 37 percent of undergraduates at the University of California Berkeley are Pell-eligible. The cuts to need-based aid will further reduce the number, ensuring that U.Va. will continue to be — in the study’s words — “one of the least socioeconomically diverse public colleges in the country.”
But the damage is not limited to disadvantaged students. Those who can afford high tuitions will be deprived of the opportunity to live and learn from students of different economic, social and cultural backgrounds. Ultimately the commonwealth will suffer by failing to develop the full potential of its qualified young people.
If the trend toward de facto privatization continues, the university will achieve a dubious goal often mouthed by U.Va. undergraduates of my generation — to become the Princeton of the South. With state appropriations stagnant, tuition skyrocketing and need-based aid declining, U.Va. is perilously close to replicating the Princeton model by creating an enclave for daughters and sons of high-income families.
Some might cheer gentrification as fulfillment of the university’s destiny, but before U.Va. unquestioningly pursues such a strategy, the state should carefully debate the issue. It might be instructive to recall what Princeton President (and Virginian) Woodrow Wilson sadly concluded as he surveyed his university’s student body in 1910: “The great voice of America does not come from the seats of learning,” Wilson warned, “but in a murmur from the hills and the woods and the farms and the factories and the mills, rolling on and gaining volume until it comes to us the voice from the homes of the common men. Do these murmurs come into the corridors of the university? I have not heard them.”
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THERE ARE 55,000 fast-food workers in New York — more than the entire population of Harrisburg, Pa. — and most, like Mr. Shoy, are struggling to stitch together a living in an industry where the median wage is $8.90 an hour. Last year, fast-food workers in Manhattan earned average pay of $19,000 — or about the cost of Mr. Shoy’s Honda. In Brooklyn, it was $15,500; on Staten Island, less.
Since 2000, the number of fast-food jobs in New York City has increased by more than 50 percent — 10 times as fast as in any other type of private job. But the conspicuous increase has not received the attention given, say, to the city’s high-tech industry, nor has it lessened the financial insecurities of this growing work force.
According to a study released in October, only 13 percent of fast-food workers get health-insurance benefits at work. In New York State, three in five have received some form of government assistance in the last five years. Meanwhile, executive pay and profits in the industry are on the rise. Last winter, Bloomberg News determined that it would take a Chicago McDonald’s worker who earns $8.25 an hour more than a century on the clock to match the $8.75 million that the company’s chief executive made in 2011.
The classic image of the high-school student flipping Big Macs after class is sorely out of date. Because of lingering unemployment and a relative abundance of fast-food jobs, older workers are increasingly entering the industry. These days, according to the National Employment Law Project, the average age of fast-food workers is 29. Forty percent are 25 or older; 31 percent have at least attempted college; more than 26 percent are parents raising children. Union organizers say that one-third to one-half of them have more than one job — like Mr. Shoy, who is 58 and supports a wife and children.
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As textile and apparel companies begin shifting more production to the United States, taking advantage of automation and other cost savings, a hard economic truth is emerging: Production of cheaper goods, for which consumers are looking for low prices, is by and large staying overseas, where manufacturers can find less expensive manufacturing. Even when consumers are confronted with the human costs of cheap production, like the factory collapse in Bangladesh that killed more than 1,000 garment workers, garment makers say, they show little inclination to pay more for clothes.
Essentially, to buy American is to pay a premium — a reality that is acting as a drag on the nascent manufacturing resurgence in textiles and apparel, while also forcing United States companies to focus their American-made efforts on higher-quality goods that fetch higher prices.
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– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/01/business/that-made-in-usa-premium.html?ref=todayspaper
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“Once upon a time, English mealtimes were miserable things. There were no potatoes, no cigars and definitely no turkey. Then people began to import a strange, exotic bird. Its scientific name was Numida meleagris; its normal name now is the helmeted guinea fowl, because it’s got this weird bony protuberance on its forehead that looks a bit like a helmet. It came all the way from Madagascar, off the southeast coast of Africa, but the English didn’t know that. All the English knew was that it was delicious, and that it was imported to Europe by merchants from Turkey. They were the Turkey merchants, and so, soon enough, the bird just got called the turkey.”
– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/28/opinion/the-turkeys-turkey-connection.html?ref=todayspaper
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Isn’t it a bad idea to release two movies with similar titles in such short order? Asked that in an interview in August, Gary Barber, MGM’s chief executive, said he was not worried. “MGM has the title locked up,” he said with a smile. “They will have to change theirs.”
But the rival companies are not budging. “If ever there was a title available for general use, it is Hercules,” a spokesman for Lions Gate said on Friday. “It is not protectable.” Dozens of films with Hercules in the title have been released over the years, from “Hercules and the Big Stick” in 1910 to “Hercules,” Disney’s animated musical, in 1997.
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– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/25/business/media/hercules-and-the-rival-studios.html?ref=todayspaper
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A few summers ago one of my best friends invited me up to what he affectionately called his “white-trash cabin” in the Adirondacks. This was not how I described the outing to my family. Two of my Jewish acquaintances once joked that I’d “make a good Jew.” My retort was not, “Yeah, I certainly am good with money.” Gay men sometimes laughingly refer to one another as “faggots.” My wife and her friends sometimes, when having a good time, will refer to one another with the word “bitch.” I am certain that should I decide to join in, I would invite the same hard conversation that would greet me, should I ever call my father Billy.
A separate and unequal standard for black people is always wrong. And the desire to ban the word “nigger” is not anti-racism, it is finishing school. When Matt Barnes used the word “niggas” he was being inappropriate. When Richie Incognito and Riley Cooper used “nigger,” they were being violent and offensive. That we have trouble distinguishing the two evidences our discomfort with the great chasm between black and white America.
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– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/24/opinion/sunday/coates-in-defense-of-a-loaded-word.html?ref=todayspaper
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Near the banquet hall where rulers of a Middle Bronze Age city-state and their guests feasted, a team of American and Israeli researchers broke through to a storage room holding the remains of 40 large ceramic jars. The vessels were broken, their liquid contents long since vanished — but not without a trace.
A chemical analysis of residues left in the three-foot-tall jars detected organic traces of acids that are common components of all wine, as well as ingredients popular in ancient winemaking. These included honey, mint, cinnamon bark, juniper berries and resins used as a preservative. The recipe was similar to medicinal wines used for 2,000 years in ancient Egypt and probably tasted something like retsina or other resinous Greek wines today.
So the archaeologists who have been exploring the Canaanite site, known as Tel Kabri, announced on Friday that they had found one of civilization’s oldest and largest wine cellars. The storage room held the equivalent of about 3,000 bottles of red and white wines, they said — and they suspected that this was not the palace’s only wine cellar.
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– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/23/science/in-ruins-of-palace-a-wine-with-hints-of-cinnamon-and-top-notes-of-antiquity.html?ref=todayspaper&_r=0
shaun james bockert 