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☆ After Period of Chastity, Hollywood Movies Embrace Sex Again
▼ + stars: | 2024-04-28 | by ( Brooks Barnes | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Zendaya, clad in a skintight dress, gyrates on a dance floor in “Challengers,” a $56 million sports drama that arrived in multiplexes on Friday. “Sex is back!” shouted an apparently elated man at the conclusion of a prerelease “Challengers” screening in West Hollywood, Calif., this month. Think about how many times the rom-com has been declared dead — and alive — and dead. (No, wait, alive.) But this much can be said with surety: Hollywood is hornier than it has been in years.

Persons: ”, “, — Locations: “, West Hollywood, Calif

☆ Opinion | Democrats Need to Stop Playing Nice
▼ + stars: | 2024-03-11 | by ( Joe Klein | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

There is a moment in the 2008 HBO movie “Recount” that illuminates an essential difference between Republicans and Democrats. Warren Christopher, a courtly former secretary of state, represents the Democratic candidate Al Gore. Democrats litigate; Republicans fight. Democrats float toward an almost helium-infused state of high-mindedness; Republicans see politics as a no-holds-barred cage match. But given the party’s recent history, the Democrats will probably need some CRISPR editing to their DNA.

Persons: Warren Christopher, Al Gore, “, ” James Baker, George W, Bush, Christopher, Baker, Biden’s Organizations: HBO, Democrats, Democratic, Democrats litigate, Republicans, Union Locations: Florida, United States, Biden’s pugilistic State

☆ Murder on a Private Greek Island
▼ + stars: | 2024-01-24 | by ( Sarah Lyall | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: 1 min

Alex Michaelides, who is best known for his blockbuster first novel, “The Silent Patient,” has a devoted following and a knack for explosive, change-everything revelations. He sets THE FURY (Celadon, 298 pp., $28.99) on a private Greek island where Lana Farrar, a stunningly beautiful British movie star, has gathered a small party of relatives and frenemies. Naturally, the weather will render the island unreachable, and the author will render a character dead. “This is a tale of murder,” the narrator, an unpleasant playwright named Elliot Chase, intones in the first sentence. As he often reminds us, Elliot is unreliable.

Persons: Alex Michaelides, ”, Lana Farrar, Elliot Chase, intones, Elliot

PETERBOROUGH, N.H. (AP) — Trying to upset President Joe Biden in New Hampshire's primary, Democratic challenger Dean Phillips is running a TV ad across the state comparing him to Bigfoot — the argument being both are hard to find. "So I challenged myself to find President Biden in New Hampshire during this primary season. He pushed through Democratic rule changes that prioritized voters of color, deemphasizing New Hampshire's primary. But New Hampshire Democratic Party Chair Ray Buckley, who once warned that the new calendar meant a major Democratic challenger could embarrass Biden, now says his write-in campaign should easily prevail. That means Biden supporters could vote in the Republican primary, where Trump and former U.N.

Persons: Joe Biden, Dean Phillips, Biden, ” Biden, —, Phillips, Marianne Williamson, Donald Trump, Trump, There’s, ”, Angela Brennan, ” Phillips, Andrew Yang, Yang, cued, Yang wasn’t, “, it’s, ’, Biden “, Peter Leishman, ” Leishman, Ray Buckley, ” Buckley, Williamson, trumpeting Biden, Kathy Sullivan, “ I’ve, ” Sullivan, ” Ellen Lavoie Cooke, “ I’m, Desmond Kager, I’ll, Nikki Haley, Tracy Moloney, she'd, he's, Moloney, Rodrigue Ngowi Organizations: Democratic, Dartmouth, Trump, White, New Hampshire Democratic, New Hampshire, Democratic Party, New, AFL, Granite, New Hampshire Democrats, Social, Biden, Republicans, Republican, GOP, Dartmouth College Locations: PETERBOROUGH, N.H, New, New Hampshire, Minnesota, Hampshire, Peterborough, Portsmouth, America, Dover, American, Plymouth, ”, Portsmouth , New Hampshire

☆ India's BJP, the world's biggest party, plots election drive of epic scale
▼ + stars: | 2023-09-26 | by ( Rupam Jain | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +9 min

[1/5] FILE PHOTO-Partha Chaudhury, 39, a worker of India's ruling Bharatiya Janarta Party (BJP), speaks with Reuters during the party's outreach program in Kolkata, India, May 30, 2023. "We want people to remember that the BJP knocked on their doors much before any opposition party worker did." "The BJP's challenge as the dominant national party is to manage voter fatigue and to sustain the enthusiasm among its cadres after two terms in power," Mehta added. "This time, the world's biggest party has launched the biggest-ever outreach to win the world's biggest elections." The BJP was beaten by a regional opposition party four years ago, even though it had strong support there, winning roughly 600,000 of the total 1.5 million votes cast.

Persons: Partha Chaudhury, India's, Avijit Ghosh, PM Modi, Chaudhury, Narendra Modi, It's, Tamoghna Ghosh, Modi, J.P, Nadda, Nalin Mehta, Mehta, isn't, Moitra, Mallikarjun Kharge, Long, Rupam Jain, Pravin Organizations: Bharatiya Janarta Party, BJP, Reuters, REUTERS, Party, PM, Bharatiya Janata Party, archrival Congress, UPES School of Modern Media, Trinamool, Krishnanagar, Pravin Char, Thomson Locations: Kolkata, India, KOLKATA, West Bengal, New Delhi, Uttarakhand, INDIA, India's, Calcutta

Online, the Defense Ministry published a splashy video ad focusing on two central motivations: machismo, and money. It defines military service as more meaningful — and manly — than what’s depicted as the Russian man’s typical, humdrum existence. Since the invasion’s beginning, state television newscasts have been offering viewers a sanitized view of the war. “I got all the payments that contract servicemen are entitled to if they’re wounded,” the veteran, Nikolai Karpenko, says. “Contract military service, Nikolai says, gave him the chance to show that he’s a real defender of the fatherland,” the reporter intones.

Persons: “, Nikolai Karpenko, Nikolai, intones Organizations: Defense Ministry, Russian Defense Locations: Russian, Irkutsk, Siberia, Ukraine

☆ Pornhub asks users, Big Tech for help as states adopt age verification laws
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-07 | by ( Brian Fung | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +8 min

Washington CNN —In the two-minute video, adult performer Cherie Deville stares into the camera and intones soberly to viewers, for the second time in a month, that policymakers are coming for their porn. It’s unclear how much Pornhub expects to achieve, as the laws have already been passed and signed. Pornhub’s simultaneous appeals to users and to Big Tech highlight the challenging position the company now finds itself in amid a wave of state legislation. Now, Pornhub’s fight could prove to be a bellwether for the growing push to enforce age verification for social media. Device-based age verification, Tiwari said, could have “very serious privacy connotations, because you now have the largest tech companies in the world having your government ID and all the information present in them linked to individual devices.

Persons: Cherie Deville, soberly, ” Deville, Pornhub, CNN it’s “, Pornhub —, —, ECP, Solomon Friedman, Friedman, ” Friedman, “, Porn, Pornhub’s, Josh Golin, ” Golin, India McKinney, ” McKinney, Udbhav Tiwari, Tiwari, ” Organizations: Washington CNN —, CNN, Ethical Capital Partners, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Big Tech, Android, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Mozilla, Twitter, Federal Trade Commission Locations: Pornhub, Utah, Arkansas , Mississippi, Virginia, India

☆ Listen to the Mother of All Playlists
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-12 | by ( ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +3 min

Listen along on Spotify as you read. Kacey Musgraves: “Mother”The shortest, sparsest song on Kacey Musgraves’s 2018 album, “Golden Hour,” is also the most emotionally piercing. “I’m just sitting here, thinking ’bout the time that’s slipping and missing my mother,” the country renegade sings with heartbreaking plaintiveness, before zooming out a generation and imagining that her own mother is probably doing the same. Musgraves has said that “Mother” is one of the “Golden Hour” songs she wrote while tripping on LSD — but don’t tell her mom that part. Merle Haggard: “Mama Tried”“Instead of life in prison I was doing one-to-15 years,” Merle Haggard once admitted of the slight embellishment as to how he spent his 21st birthday in one of his most famous (and semi-autobiographical) songs.

☆ There's overwhelming support for an age limit on the president and Congress. Here's why that won't happen anytime soon.
▼ + stars: | 2022-09-26 | by ( Bryan Metzger | Brent D. Griffiths | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +21 min

Some have proposed age limits for elected officials amid concerns about America's gerontocracy. The history of the contemporary movement for term limits largely dates back to the early 1990s, when dozens of states enacted term limits not just for their own legislatures but for their federal representatives in Washington. "Put it this way: I'm a little more interested in term limits than age limits," Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland told Insider. "There's a logic to term limits, because the principle of democracy is taking turns," Raskin, 59, said. "If there were to be term limits, the legislature certainly should have more terms than the executive," he offered.

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