Weekend Reads: Jetpacks, "Silverhawks," "Tenet," Facial Recognition, COVID
Recommended weekend reading material for July 17, 2021.
Every week, I compile a list of interesting and thought-provoking articles to offer you some enjoyable weekend reading material.
It’s 2021. So why don’t we have our own jetpacks? Chris Nashawaty interviewed one of the original jetpack pilots to figure why this particular future never came to pass.
It was a heady time in our history, when anything seemed possible. Just six years earlier, during the initial, heated days of the Space Race with the Soviet Union in 1961, John F. Kennedy declared to Congress that the United States would safely send a man to the moon by the end of the decade. Scientists told us that one day we would have colonies on the lunar surface. From there, we would boldly blast off to Mars. Then maybe even Jupiter or Venus. Everything seemed within our reach. Jetpacks just felt like part of that brave-new-world promise. Man would become one with heavens. So what happened? How did this fantasy in which we were promised jetpacks fail to launch?
Nostalgia alert! I’m not going to lie: the possibility of a SilverHawks revival has me more excited than I probably should be.
The 1986 animated TV series SilverHawks, a companion series to the Rankin-Bass hit ThunderCats and the later series TigerSharks, may be getting a revival. An exclusive report today in Deadline says The Nacelle Company, which produces the Netflix nostalgia series The Movies That Made Us and The Toys That Made Us, has partnered with San Francisco toy and culture house Super7 to reboot the show, which ran for 65 episodes in the mid-1980s.
I loved SilverHawks back in the day, even more so than the celebrated ThunderCats, which has already had several reboots. A SilverHawks reboot in the same vein as Netflix’s recent Voltron series would be A-OK in my book.
Related: Toy Galaxy’s breakdown will tell you everything you ever wanted to know about SilverHawks (and then some) in just six minutes.
Alisa Ruddell makes a case for why Christopher Nolan’s Tenet is better than James Bond.
This is one film that not only rewards multiple viewings, it frankly requires them (subtitles help, and so does the fact that it’s now streaming on HBO Max). The emotional depth and symbolic meaning reveal themselves only after the narrative has become clear enough that you can take it for granted and place your attention elsewhere. The movie’s heart isn’t missing, but it is missable when your brain is too busy. Perhaps that’s Nolan’s fault for throwing too much at us. Or perhaps that’s the fun of it, chime the Nolan devotees — solving the puzzle afterward.
Ruddell’s article inspired us to watch Tenet last night. I get why people have criticized it — it’s really long, really convoluted, feels very clinical at times, and employs a lot of hand-waving to distract from the fact that it often makes very little sense — but I also kind of don’t care.
I was never bored while watching Tenet and its mythology was just tantalizing enough to keep me intrigued throughout its entire 2 1/2 hour runtime.
In a move that will probably upset no one at all, Twitter is killing Fleets.
Twitter’s decision to axe Fleets is not just an admission that the feature didn’t work, but that the company still hasn’t figured out how to get people tweeting more. For years, Twitter has struggled to get new users to post regularly and not just consume other people’s tweets. Fleets was its shot at using Stories, the popular social media format invented by Snapchat and further popularized by Instagram, to lower the pressure around tweeting.
Maybe now they can start working on an honest-to-goodness “Edit” button, or improve their efforts to combat the spread of misinformation.
One of my favorite tech writers, Casey Newton, reviews a recent book about Facebook’s activities during the 2016 election.
Facebook had many failures during 2016, but the greatest one was of imagination: an inability to see that a platform that had gathered together billions of people would create a powerful point of leverage for foreign adversaries seeking to reshape public opinion — and to benefit from the platform’s own viral sharing mechanics.
How does the design of “big tech” platforms like Facebook and YouTube lead to bad interactions and discussions?
My colleagues and I investigated how the design of social media affects online disagreements and how to design for constructive arguments. We surveyed and interviewed 257 people about their experiences with online arguments and how design could help. We asked which features of 10 different social media platforms made it easy or difficult to engage in online arguments, and why.
A Black teen was recently kicked out of a roller rink in a case that highlights the dangers and flaws of facial recognition technology.
The girl, Lamya Robinson, says that security scanned her face upon entry and barred her from going inside, despite her claim that she’d never entered the building before. Add one more story to a mountain of evidence that face recognition doesn’t work, and it’s a public hazard, particularly to Black people.
Netflix is planning to add video games to their service sometime next year.
Netflix hinted recently that it would be interested in stepping up its pursuit of gaming. The company has flirted with games before through its interactive, choose-your-own-adventure-style programming like Bandersnatch and through some licensing and merchandising partnerships. But in April, Netflix's chief operating and product officer signaled that Netflix's interest in gaming may be advancing.
Video games will be made available as a new genre, and won’t cost anything extra. This, naturally, raises all kinds of questions about the type and style of the games that will be offered. My guess is that Netflix’s video game offering will be similar to Apple’s Arcade service, which lets you play games on your TV via an Apple TV device.
If Christians are concerned about the systemic effects of the sexual revolution, then Karen Swallow Prior argues that they ought to be concerned about the systemic effects of racism, too.
It’s perplexing to me that the same conservative Christian community of which I am a part — the one that decries the deleterious and nearly inescapable effects of a sexual revolution built into our national laws, culture and institutions — can deny that the racist systems upon which our nation was founded and built cannot be equally pervasive and damaging. Even if the most egregious racist laws have been overturned, that doesn’t mean their effects are erased.
Ekemini Uwan wonders if, in our rush to return to pre-COVID “normal,” we’re forsaking opportunities to create a better society.
The pandemic laid bare the speed at which societal change can occur when the threat is big enough. Conversely, society’s reopening is revealing just how quickly we can slide back into complacency. The chasm between the legion of inequities confronting us and the modest responses to them — if they have been responded to at all — is stunning.
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