Your week in review, in haiku
1.
Find someone who looks
at you like Bradley Cooper
looks at the Eagles.
2.
Product pitch: “Alpha
Female Doritos made from
glass ceiling shards.” <Bows>
3.
On a scale of one
to great again, how tall is
little Adam Schiff?
4.
A fancy car flies
into space, trains and markets
crash. Most peculiar.
5.
A Grateful life: The
wired, cybercowboy sleeps
by the silver stream
Have an astronomically lyrical weekend.
On Point
| A new tool from ProPublica is helping people find targeted political ads |
| Concerns about political advertising on the platform – specifically, fleeting, propaganda-filled ads sent to targeted audiences and designed to influence voters – have soared after allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. elections. ProPublica’s new tool is called the Political Ad Collector, and gathers ads from the Facebook feeds of anyone who installs it in their browsers. Anyone can use it, but it’s also being used by journalists in the U.S. and in seven other countries. The tool appears to out-deliver on any of Facebook’s promised reforms. It’s already been used last year by The Guardian Australia to help fact-check ads that were sent only to Christian users to sway public opinion on the country’s same-sex marriage legislation. |
| ProPublica |
| Mellon Foundation names a poet as next president |
| Elizabeth Alexander, who wrote and delivered an original poem at Barack Obama’s 2009 inaugural address, has been tapped to be the next president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. She will be the first woman and first black woman at the helm. Alexander, the author of six poetry books and two essay collections, was recently a humanities professor at Columbia, and previously the director of creativity and free expression at the Ford Foundation, which, when you think about it, is about the best job description in the world. In 2016, Mellon’s endowment was responsible for some $298 million in humanities-related grants, nearly half of which supported universities and the arts. Subscribers of The Chronicle of Philanthropy can learn more here. Click below for more and share widely, particularly with anyone who smirked when you said you wanted to study poetry. Or literature. Or history. Or philosophy. |
| New York Times |
| Meet Letitia Wright, the future of film |
| One of the more delightful offshoots of the Black Panther phenomenon now are the profiles of the actors, and the groundbreaking new archetypes they’ve been tapped to play. Letitia Wright is Black Panther’s younger sister, Shuri, a new kind of teen princess – a tech-savvy genius who is two parts Tony Stark and one part sweetly normal teenage woman. Her ascendance means a new role model for girls and a new epiphany for her peers, teachers and future employers. As an actor, Wright’s been busy — by spring she will have wowed audiences in the finale of Black Mirror, appeared in The Commuter with Liam Neeson and Steven Spielberg’s long-awaited Ready Player One. Click through for her story, which starts in Ghana and is kicked off with a spelling bee. |
| New York Times |
The Woke Leader
| Here’s the reason you got to meet Letitia Wright |
| Well, mostly because she's brilliant. But also because she had people who supported her growth. An extraordinary drama school has been helping to break the black ceiling in entertainment in the UK and beyond. London’s Identity School of Acting, Britain’s first black drama school, has been helping to shape young black talent of color and change the race ratio in the film industry; roughly sixty percent of films in the UK produced in the last decade didn’t have a single black actor in a named or lead role. The school started in 2003 with just ten aspiring actors. They’ve now trained thousands, including Wright, Roots' Malachi Kirby and Star Wars’ John Boyega. The school's founder, Femi Oguns, has been on a mission. “We need to challenge the decision-makers and the producers and educate them," Oguns told the BBC. |
| BBC |
| On Chinese New Year, the emotional menu gets complicated |
| NPR’s Kat Chow has a poignant piece on the mixed feelings she has about hosting a shorter than usual version of her family’s annual New Year dinner, wondering how to make the meal, which is rich with ritual and symbolism, meaningful for her aging father and still relevant for her more Americanized self. “All across the country this weekend, major cities with established Asian populations will roll out Lunar New Year parades with great fanfare,” she writes. “I will be in my old Brooklyn apartment with my dad, burning incense on my fire escape.” Like all good journalists, she asked experts to help her understand the history of the celebration, which evidently includes a tradition of inter-generational conflict. |
| NPR |
| A corporate call to action for family unity during the Lunar New Year |
| In a similar vein, this sweet short film from Maybank Singapore aims to remind families that the Lunar New Year is also about love and the ties that bind. The story starts in the 1990s, and stars a cash-strapped family with two young daughters who struggle to get by. Fast forward, and the two sisters, now successful business women, have grown apart. Don’t worry, it works out. A lovely look at family life, tradition, the changing roles of women in Southeast Asia, and what a big bank thinks their customers need to know. |
| Marketing Interactive |
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