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Up to 85% of the jobs in 2030 have yet to be invented. As AI continues advancing rapidly, many jobs and professions we know today will be automated or replaced within the next decade. While this shift may seem challenging, recognizing the industries most likely to be affected and preparing for change can help you […]

Previous low of 32% in 2016

The goal is always to re-write history

In what may be an unfortunate sign of the times, a new conference has launched to bring together white-collar offenders, their loved ones, lawyers, and community members to address the unique challenges following a criminal conviction. The White Collar Conference 2024 aims to fill a gap in the current landscape by providing a much-needed space […]

A post shared to X claims that a Greek Orthodox priest died in an Israeli strike in Lebanon. Israel killed this Lebanese Christian priest and his entire family, then bombed a church. pic.twitter.com/ULsqsnnO02 — Syrian Girl ?? (@Partisangirl) October 13, 2024 Verdict: False Father Gregorios Salloum was not killed in the Israeli-led strike against Hezbollah […]

Our 10 Best Elton John Songs from the 1980s article takes a look at the second decade of Elton John’s musical career. For many hardcore Elton John fans who grew up in the seventies, this era didn’t seem to have the same artistic impact as the phenomenal run from 1970 to 1976. However, the body of work he released in the 1980s is still special. Elton John released nine studio albums during that time, and most songwriters would give anything just to have one of those albums to their name. So, in no way is this a putdown of any The post 10 Best Elton John Songs From The 1980s appeared first on ClassicRockHistory.com.

Movies & TV the Penguin “I’m not broken” — The Penguin’s “Cent’Anni” Sofia learns the truth about Penguin as more of her own backstory is revealed… By Keith R.A. DeCandido | Published on October 15, 2024 Credit: Macall Polay/HBO Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Macall Polay/HBO After watching this week’s episode of The Penguin, I find it impossible to believe that someone on the production staff, whether it’s executive producer/showrunner Lauren LeFranc or someone underneath her, isn’t very familiar with Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Written in 1892, Gilman’s story is a scathing indictment of the treatment of women by the nascent psychiatric community of doctors, with women fobbed off into useless and/or harmful “treatments” to cure them of whatever ailments they were suffering from, whether real or imagined, and often an excuse to get rid of “problematic” women. The narrator of the story is confined to a room with yellow wallpaper. The tale is both a brilliant bit of social commentary and a magnificent horror story, as we get a first-person look at the narrator’s descent into madness, which is due, not to hysteria, as the male doctors have insisted, but her confinement in this one room that’s supposed to be for her own good. The reason why I know that someone on the staff has to be familiar with the story (or, perhaps, one of the film adaptations of this nineteenth-century classic that has been done in the twenty-first century) is that Sofia Falcone’s story in the “Cent’Anni” episode of The Penguin is a pretty direct analogue to that of Gilman’s never-named narrator. About two-thirds of the episode is given over to Sofia’s backstory. We start with the other half of the end of last week’s episode. Nadia Maroni makes it clear that she’s not going to put up with Penguin’s nonsense anymore. She also reveals to Sofia that Penguin, not Sal Maroni, killed her brother Alberto. Then Vic runs over one of Nadia’s thugs, Penguin shoots two more of them, and they get in the car and drive off. Somewhere in there, Sofia suffers a major head injury. She calls Dr. Rush to ask for help, then passes out… …at which point we flash back a decade. Sofia is the good daughter to Carmine Falcone, the one who actually knows what she’s doing, as opposed to ne’er-do-well fuckup Alberto. We get the full story of how Sofia’s mother died: nine-year-old Sofia found her having apparently hanged herself. Carmine (played by Mark Strong due to John Turturro not being available to reprise his role from The Batman) tells her that he’s going to name her, rather than Alberto, his heir. Sofia is thrilled. Credit: Macall Polay/HBO (The recasting is only partly successful. Strong has made a career out of playing bad guys—indeed, he has three other comic book villains on his resumé, Sinestro in Green Lantern, Dr. Sivana in Shazam!, and Frank D’Amico in Kick Ass—but one of the reasons why Turturro’s performance in The Batman worked so well is that he had a pleasant charm as the velvet glove over the iron fist of his menace. Strong is all iron fist; his drinking wine with Sofia when he makes her his heir should be more familial, but Strong’s sneer makes that not quite work as well as planned, thus diluting the impact of later scenes when the menace is more overt.) And then Sofia makes her first mistake: she talks to a reporter. Summer Gleeson of the Gotham Gazette (a character who originated as a TV reporter in Batman: The Animated Series, played here by Nadine Malouf) approaches Sofia, and shows her evidence of several women who were killed by being hanged, just like her mother. It also looks like evidence was suppressed, both in the case of her mother and these women, who all worked in the secret “44 Below” club underneath the Iceberg Lounge (which we also saw in The Batman). We already know from the movie that Carmine sometimes slept with the women who worked there—one of them produced a child, Selina Kyle, a.k.a. Catwoman. And now it seems that someone has killed them but made it look like suicide. Gleeson thinks it might be Carmine. Sofia’s driver, Oz Cobb—whom we see as someone friendly and helpful to Sofia, even though she mostly treats him like the help—is the one who takes her to a second meeting with Gleeson. At first Sofia is concerned, but then she tells the reporter to fuck off, particularly after Gleeson asks her to wear a wire into 44 Below. Penguin tells Carmine about this, of course—how can he not? But Carmine’s reaction is devastating. It’s clear that Carmine is responsible for these women’s deaths—and also possibly for his wife’s death—and it’s equally clear that Sofia is starting to put it together. Carmine is no fool, and he knows his daughter is also no fool. So he preemptively takes her off the board, as it were, using his influence with his family, with the press, and with the police to have Sofia arrested for the murders of all the women, plus the latest victim: reporter Summer Gleeson. Sofia is committed for psychiatric evaluation. Part of the evidence presented for that are affidavits from several family members, including Carla Viti. You might recall we saw an awkward conversation between Sofia and Carla last week, and this week the flashback shows the two of them thick as thieves prior to Sofia’s arrest. So Sofia is rather devastated to see that one of the affidavits claiming that Sofia has a (wholly fictional) history of mental illness is from Carla. Credit: Macall Polay/HBO And so Sofia goes through what the narrator of Gilman’s short story goes through, only on a much bigger scale. She’s committed to Arkham State Hospital for six months to see if she’s competent to stand trial. We see Rush when he first met Sofia, the assistant to the head doctor, who treats Sofia like she’s already guilty, already diagnosed as being mentally unfit. Sofia’s next door to a blonde named Margaret Pye, who calls herself Magpie. (We also see her being given a red drug that we recognize from last week as Bliss; Magpie calls it “candy.”) Magpie is based on a Gotham City-based villain from the comics, and she’s also completely ’round the bend. Sofia suffers through the half-year, which includes a rather appalling amount of electroshock therapy, expecting a trial at the end of it. But then we find out that the director of the hospital, no doubt at Carmine’s instruction, declared her unfit for trial and recommended she remain hospitalized. And there she stayed for ten years. Throughout, we see the dehumanizing treatment, the assumptions of insanity based on no evidence except for the denial of same, which is both what a crazy person would say and what a sane person would say, so it’s rather poor evidence. The tiny cells, the abuse—at one point, a fellow inmate has somehow gotten out of her chains and assaulted Sofia; she later commits suicide with a fork—and the electroshock do their job a little too well. Driven to her breaking point by the denial of a trial, she beats Magpie to death in the mess hall and then declares to the doctors that she’s “fucking innocent.” During all this, we see the wallpaper in her cell, and it’s yellow (matching the wallpaper in the room where she found her mother). She claws at it, just as Gilman’s narrator did, and it contributes to her downward spiral. Then we cut back to the present. Rush apparently quit his job at Arkham in protest for how Sofia was treated, which is why he’s treating her privately now. We don’t see the exact circumstances of her release, though the fact that it happened after Carmine’s death is probably not a coincidence. Credit: Macall Polay/HBO The main difference between Sofia and Gilman’s narrator is how it ends. Sofia not only is freed, she’s liberated. She isn’t the Hangman murderer, but everyone thinks she is, so she embraces it. She’s spent all her life being victimized at least in part because of her gender. (At one point before she’s arrested, and before Carmine initially makes her his heir, she says frankly to Penguin, “You have a dick, so at least you’re eligible for promotion.”) But now, she’s taking over in the only way she can. Wearing a bright yellow dress, she intrudes on a family dinner and tells everyone there how much she “appreciates” all the support she got from the family, who lied in affidavits and/or never visited or cared about her in the least after she was unjustly committed. Then she wakes up Gia, Carla’s little daughter, and takes her out to the greenhouse for a midnight snack, and they then sleep there, just like she and Alberto did when they were kids. In the morning, she leaves Gia asleep and checks the house while wearing a gas mask: she’s gassed almost the entire house, and with the exception of Gia, safe in the greenhouse, and Johnny, whose room was spared, the entire Falcone family is dead. Why she kept Johnny alive (beyond Michael Kelly being in the opening credits) is not yet clear, but we’ve still got four episodes to go… “Cent’Anni”—an Italian toast that means, “May you live a hundred yeas,” a toast Sofia gives to a room full of people she intends to murder that night—is a brilliant treatise on how it’s still, more than a century after “The Yellow Wallpaper,” incredibly easy to marginalize and relegate smart, capable women by deeming them hysterical. The difference here—because it’s fiction, and you can create your own ending—is that Sofia survives and now thrives. As much as the title character, Sofia Falcone is a smart person who had the misfortune to be born with characteristics that make it easy for them to be dismissed. For Penguin, it’s his looks, deformities, and background. For Sofia, it’s that she was born with a uterus. It will be very interesting to see how the rest of this plays out, especially since they’re on opposite sides now, and the Maronis are still a wild card.[end-mark] The post “I’m not broken” — <i>The Penguin</i>’s “Cent’Anni” appeared first on Reactor.

Column Babylon 5 Rewatch Babylon 5 Rewatch: “A Distant Star” By Keith R.A. DeCandido | Published on October 15, 2024 Credit: Warner Bros. Television Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Warner Bros. Television “A Distant Star”Written by D.C. FontanaDirected by Jim JohnstonSeason 2, Episode 4Production episode 204Original air date: November 23, 1994 It was the dawn of the third age… We open on the EAS Cortez, an Explorer-class vessel under the command of Captain Jack Maynard, who has a very specific message sent to B5. They’ve been out mapping the rim, and are coming to B5 for resupply. The ship comes through the jumpgate and proves to be almost as big as B5 itself. Maynard and Sheridan are old friends—the message he sent refers to Sheridan as “swamp rat”—and their reunion is a happy one. Maynard, who was Sheridan’s first CO, is surprised to see Sheridan in a desk job, and also discusses some weird stuff he saw out on the rim. Perhaps conscious of Maynard’s dismissive tone toward his new job, Sheridan bites Garibaldi’s head off when the security chief comes to him with a shoplifting issue, which Sheridan thinks is beneath his notice. Credit: Warner Bros. Television Franklin puts Garibaldi on a diet—which he calls an “eating plan” to make it sound less like he’s on a diet. Garibaldi insists that he has always eaten whatever he wants, and Franklin says that was before he got shot. Garibaldi also says he’s soon going to be making bagna càuda, but as soon as he lists the ingredients of same, Franklin puts his foot down that he absolutely should not have that. On a roll, Franklin also provides eating plans for Sheridan (who’s put on weight since taking over the station) and Ivanova (who, like Garibaldi, needs to change her diet due to her injuries). Maynard and Sheridan tell war stories over dinner with Ivanova, Keffer, and Zeta Team Flight Leader Ray Galus. Afterward, Maynard tells Sheridan about a big black ship he thinks he saw, but couldn’t confirm. (We now know that it was a Shadow ship.) A Minbari named Teronn meets with Delenn. There is great concern among the Minbari on the station regarding her transformation. They’re not even sure she is Minbari anymore. Credit: Warner Bros. Television The Cortez heads back out, now fully resupplied. But once in hyperspace they suffer a major malfunction, which knocks main power offline and causes the vessel to drift, losing their link to the hyperspace beacon. Maynard’s visit has not been good for Sheridan, as now he feels like he’s been beached. He was trained to be a starship captain, not the mayor of a city in space. The eating plan isn’t helping, and he, Ivanova, and Garibaldi at one point try to trade foods, until Franklin walks past them with a stern look. Garibaldi works with Orwell, a customs and import worker, to get the ingredients for bagna càuda, Franklin’s order be damned. Orwell points out that won’t be cheap or easy, but Garibaldi is willing to pay whatever’s necessary. Delenn goes in for an exam, to her annoyance, but Franklin insists, especially given the unique nature of her transformation. During the exam, Delenn mentions hearing Garibaldi mentioning the arrival of the bagna càuda, which the ambassador mistakenly believes is a new alien race coming to the station. Maynard orders a distress call sent. It’s a long shot, as it may not penetrate into normal space, but they have to take the chance. Sure enough, B5 hears the distress call. Sheridan sends out the Starfuries, ordering them to act like a chain, with one Starfury at the jumpgate, and others moving increasingly inward, providing a lifeline for the Cortez. Galus and Keffer are the final two ships in the lifeline, and they locate the Cortez. However something (a Shadow ship) moves through hyperspace; it destroys Galus’ Starfury and damages Keffer’s. However, Keffer is able to fire his weapons, and does so continuously in a straight line, giving the Cortez a path to take to the rest of the Starfuries. Credit: Warner Bros. Television The Cortez and all but two of the Starfuries return to B5. Sheridan is saddened to learn that Galus and Keffer didn’t make it. Franklin shows up in the cargo bay just as Garibaldi is unpacking his box of bagna càuda ingredients. Garibaldi finally explains why this is so important: when he was a kid, his father would always make bagna càuda on his birthday. Since his Dad died, Garibaldi always makes it on his birthday to honor him. Franklin relents and allows Garibaldi to go ahead—but only if he makes enough for two. Delenn sees Sheridan in the Zen Garden and offers him words of comfort, assuring him that the universe generally puts us where we’re supposed to go. As Keffer drifts in hyperspace, he sees another Shadow ship. It pops out of hyperspace, and Keffer is able to use that as a reference point to steer back home. Sheridan is relieved that at least one of them made it back. They hold a wake for Galus, and Ivanova also tells Keffer that he’s now in command of Zeta Wing. Franklin enjoys the hell out of the bagna càuda, even though he admits that he can feel his arteries hardening just being in the same room as it. Meanwhile, Sheridan digs into his mountain of paperwork, feeling better about being mayor now. Get the hell out of our galaxy! Weirdly, even though it was established that Maynard and Sheridan hadn’t seen each other in at least five years, Maynard doesn’t once bring up Sheridan’s wife, who’s only been dead for two years. Ivanova is God. Ivanova eats well and exercises, so she’s more than a little put out by Franklin’s eating plan, especially since it means she’ll gain weight initially. This prompts a complaint from Ivanova about how she’s fought against imperialism all her life and now is becoming the expanding Russian frontier, to which Franklin makes the rather icky riposte, “With very nice borders.” The household god of frustration. Garibaldi didn’t have the closest relationship with his father, but the birthday bagna càuda is one of the fondest memories the security chief has of him. The ritual obviously means a great deal to him, and it’s to Franklin’s credit that he not only lets him go through with it, but asks to participate. Credit: Warner Bros. Television If you value your lives, be somewhere else. Delenn is pretty obviously flying blind and without a net, as the Minbari doubt that she’s even still Minbari, and the non-Minbari don’t really know what to make of her, either. She also quotes Carl Sagan without attribution… The Shadowy Vorlons. The Shadows apparently like to just hang out in hyperspace… No sex, please, we’re EarthForce. Delenn bucks Sheridan up, which proves beneficial to him, and which also gives us the first signs of their eventual relationship. Welcome aboard. The big guest is the great Russ Tamblyn, of West Side Story, Peyton Place, and Twin Peaks fame, as Maynard. Other members of Maynard’s crew on the Cortez are played by Daniel Beer and Patty Toy. (Toy previously played a Psi Corps representative in “A Voice in the Wilderness, Part I.”) Art Kimbro plays Galus and Miguel A. Nuñez Jr. plays Orwell. Joshua Cox is back from “The Geometry of Shadows” as Corwin; he’ll be back in “A Spider in the Web.” And Sandey Grinn plays the first of three different roles as Teronn; he’ll return as a Narn captain in “Acts of Sacrifice” and a human telepath in “The Exercise of Vital Powers.” Trivial matters. Bagna càuda is a real thing, a fondue-like dish full of garlic and anchovies, which has its origins in Piedmont, Italy, and which is common in northern Italy and southeast France, as well as places like Argentina and parts of the U.S. that have lots of immigrants from that region. Keffer mentions reading an article about the possibility of something living in hyperspace. He’s probably referring to the Universe Today article, the headline for which was seen in “And the Sky Full of Stars.” Much of Delenn’s pep talk to Sheridan lifts from Carl Sagan, particularly the famous quote “we are starstuff.” Sheridan acts as if he’s never heard the phrase before, which I find difficult to credit for someone who makes his living in space, but I suppose it’s possible. Ivanova is still injured from last time, mirroring the real-life injury suffered by Claudia Christian. The echoes of all of our conversations. “You think that’s good, wait till dessert.” “Now wait a minute, I didn’t authorize dessert.” “No? Then you can’t have any.” “What is it?” “Doesn’t matter—you’re not getting any.” “No no no, let’s not be hasty.” “No no no no no, too late.” —Garibaldi torturing Franklin over bagna càuda. Credit: Warner Bros. Television The name of the place is Babylon 5. “We are starstuff.” To me, this will always be the bagna càuda episode. While it’s not something that was ever in the repertoire of my various Italian-American relatives, it’s still a yummy Italian food, which always makes my heart happy. And it’s a nice tradition Garibaldi has with his Dad. I especially like that, once it becomes something personal, Franklin modulates from Garibaldi’s doctor to his friend and asks to partake in the tradition. Having said that, the put-everyone-on-a-diet subplot is weak-tea sitcom nonsense, complete with silly 90s euphemisms (“eating plan”), creepy dialogue (Franklin’s oogy “nice borders” line), and mediocre humor (the plate-switching scene). The rest of the episode is good. As with last time, the guest casting hits it out of the park, as Russ Tamblyn is superb, making Maynard a very lived-in character, with perfect best-friend chemistry with Bruce Boxleitner. The rescue mission is handled well, especially since the Cortez is made up entirely of guest stars, and killing off the main character’s heretofore-unseen best friend is a long-established cliché, so there’s an expectation that Maynard and his crew might not make it. Adding to this is the constant stream of portentious utterings about the coming darkness we’ve been getting since “Chrysalis,” and you genuinely fear for the Cortez. Which makes their rescue all the sweeter. Alas, the redshirting of Galus doesn’t land as well, nor does the attempt to give Keffer a minor spotlight. Both characters are complete ciphers, making it hard to get worked up over their danger, especially since Galus is a guest star and Keffer is an opening-credits regular, so the former’s death is expected for the same reason that Maynard’s was feared, and Keffer’s survival is almost a given. (Caveat necessary for reasons that will be clear at season’s end.) This is Keffer’s second appearance and he has yet to be granted a personality, which is problematic. I’m iffy about the writing decision to have Delenn quote Carl Sagan without attribution, but it’s such a great quote, I think I can forgive it. And it’s nice to see Sheridan come to embrace his job, and also see the beginnings of the Sheridan-Delenn pairing in the conversation where she quotes Sagan. Next week: “The Long Dark.”[end-mark] The post <i>Babylon 5</i> Rewatch: “A Distant Star” appeared first on Reactor.

News The Monkey The Monkey Trailer Reminds Us Everybody Dies, Sometimes in Very Gross Ways This monkey is not your buddy By Vanessa Armstrong | Published on October 15, 2024 Credit: Neon Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Neon The Monkey, Osgood Perkins’ adaptation of the Stephen King story of the same name, got its first trailer today. And based on what we see, it looks like a gory, wackily f****ed up tale where a lot of people die thanks to a toy monkey causing freak “accidents” wherever it roams. Here’s the official synopsis: Twin brothers Hal and Bill discover their father’s old monkey toy in the attic, a series of gruesome deaths starts occurring all around them. The brothers decide to throw the monkey away and move on with their lives, growing apart over the years. But when the mysterious deaths begin again, the brothers must reunite to find a way to destroy the monkey for good before it takes the lives of everyone close to them. This is Osgood Perkins’ next movie after the much-hyped horror film Longlegs, which starred Nicolas Cage as a notorious serial killer. The Monkey looks equally gruesome, though today’s trailer suggests it will be tinged with dark humor. The clip also gives us glimpses of some of the cast, including Theo James (Divergent), Tatiana Maslany (Orphan Black), and the young Christian Convery (Sweet Tooth). Elijah Wood is also part of the cast, and James Wan is the film’s producer. The Monkey premieres in theaters on February 21, 2025. Check out the trailer below.[end-mark] The post <i>The Monkey</i> Trailer Reminds Us Everybody Dies, Sometimes in Very Gross Ways appeared first on Reactor.