Daily Archives: November 19, 2021

Trigger warnings have been built into a new device developed for classrooms and social gatherings that sounds an alarm when it detects offensive language and jokes.

The lamp-sized gadget is an attempt to manifest political correctness as an ideology into a product, developers have said, and it is being trialled for potential use as a tool to moderate debate in settings like UK schools and universities.

Branded the Themis, the device is intended to be placed amid a debate setting and to emit a warning when it is triggered by the sound of banned language, racial terms and comments about body image.

Dinner parties and family gatherings could be also policed by the product, its designer has said, as the device could speak up for those at the table offended by certain topics of conversation and encourage self-critique in others.

Zinah Issa, who unveiled the product at Dubai Design Week, told The Telegraph: Through the use of speech recognition and sound sensors, we were able to program Themis to detect offensive terms and sentences - racial slurs, offensive jokes - through the microphone.

She added that extremely bothersome alarms triggered by such language last approximately two minutes, after which Themis turns off, allowing then an open understanding discussion among people on the possible trigger matter and the potential reasons behind Themis's activation.

Research is ongoing to see what terminology buyers would wish to have trigger the alarm on the Themis, which shares its name with a Greek goddess of justice and social order.

Research is also being conducted to assess the best market for the device, with an aim to explore its application in educational settings like universities, which faced calls for lecturers to issue trigger warnings ahead of teaching potentially offensive material.

Ms Issa, based in the UAE, said: Themis was designed to be placed in intimate social settings, such as dinner parties or family gatherings, because based on our research people are less likely to speak up when they get offended, unlike settings where people could be held accountable.

However, after exhibiting in GGS (Global Grad Show at Dubai Design Week) a lot of people were interested in having it in workspaces and even classrooms, so this is something that we want to develop Themis around.

Well plan on sending out more surveys to further understand Themiss target market and the audience it could reach and potentially testing it out within educational and work settings such as universities, schools and offices.

Remarks deemed offensive in educational settings have been a course of increasing controversy, with Prof Kathleen Stock recently subjected to a campaign calling for her sacking from Sussex University over her comments on gender.

Designers of the Themis are hoping to market the market product alongside hundreds of inventions and innovations unveiled at the annual Dubai Design Week, at which more than 500 companies have exhibited new work.

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The thought police have arrived with 'trigger warning' alarm that goes off at every offensive remark - Telegraph.co.uk

College is supposed to be the best years of your life which may or may not be true (it's okay to peak later), but it's undeniably an exciting new chapter. For many, college is their first time away from home and family, a chance for reinvention and independence, no matter what you choose to do with it. College stories, a dime a dozen in Hollywood, tend to be fairly formulaic, but HBO Max's The Sex Lives of College Girls promises the rich, raunchy storytelling that this unique stage of life deserves.

Created by Mindy Kaling and Justin Noble, The Sex Lives of College Girls follows four first years at a prestigious Vermont college: Student athlete Whitney (Alyah Chanelle Scott), aspiring comedy writer Bela (Amrit Kaur), legacy brat Leighton (Rene Rapp), and the kind but naive Kimberly (Pauline Chalamet). They find each other the way so many college soulmates do: Randomly, in this case thanks to a dormitory assignment.

Despite a somewhat reductive title, The Sex Lives of College Girls is a rollicking good time and a rare TV show that really delves into the multifaceted and endlessly entertaining world of undergraduate shenanigans. Scott, Kaur, Rapp, and Chalamet have the kind of chemistry that lights up a scene and invites you in. Kaur's raucous energy and Chalamet's meticulous delivery run away with most of their scenes. Any combination of two or three of the girls works just as well as the full squad, like a Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants where the focus is also on other people's pants.

Female friendship :')Credit: HBO

Fans of the Kaling oeuvre will recognize her comic rhythms, on display here with a knack for subverting our first impressions of these characters. Demure Kimberly doesn't hesitate to stand up for herself, while prim and proper Leighton loves a good expletive. Bela is the most forward about her horny determination, but how it will manifest from a naked party to a library meet cute to a concerning power move to get a writing job will never be what you expect. There are pockets where the comedic tone shifts without warning, but the characters are at least at the same party (literally and figuratively) which sells those scenes instead of disorienting the viewer.

HBO provided critics with the first six episodes, during which the show is still uneven in handling the girls' individual journeys. Some are romantic or sexual, some academic, some socioeconomic or familial, but no one is written out fully enough to have it all. Whitney feels the most underwritten for the first half of the season, where the focus is on a predictable relationship more than her athletics, academics, or the pressure of being a Senator's daughter.

The show gets a little tenuous when it comes to such serious subjects: Whitneys life beyond romance, Kimberly's financial struggles, Leighton's journey to accept herself. The bones are there, but so is the modern comedy reflex to speak to progressive ideas but still comfort those who fear political correctness. Leighton's hours working at a women's center provide stereotypical hypersensitive depictions of LGBTQIA+ students that never really go away, even as she immerses herself in their world.

But Sex Lives is, simply put, a whole lot of fun. After a one-hour premiere the 30-minute episodes fly by in a whirl of frat parties, one-liners, and deeply relatable subplots like obsessing over an Instagram comment or corroborating lies to please parents. It might look exactly like your college experience or not resemble it at all, but anyone who was ever that age can relate to the infinite, terrifying possibility of newfound maturity or lack thereof.

The Sex Lives of College Girls is now streaming on HBO Max, with three weekly episodes Nov. 25 and Dec. 2, and the final two on Dec. 9.

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'The Sex Lives of College Girls' on HBO Max is a hilarious, sexy treat from Mindy Kaling - Mashable

Earlier this year Dave Eggers announced that the US hardback of his latest novel, The Every, would not be distributed via Amazon, presumably recognising that it would be absurd to boost the fortunes of the omnipotent online retailer while at the same time setting out to satirise it mercilessly. I dont like bullies, he told the New York Times. Amazon has been kicking sand in the face of independent bookstores for decades now. But no novelist who actually wants their book to sell can avoid Amazon for long, and Eggerss boycott contained some fine print: unlike the hardback, the US paperback and ebook versions of The Every will be available on the US website, and there will be no restrictions on selling the UK editions. The Everys thesis is that big tech represents a 21st-century form of totalitarianism to which resistance can only ever be symbolic, and therefore futile. One might well wonder whether this half-hearted boycott was designed to prove that point.

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The novel is a follow-up to Eggerss 2013 dystopian satire, The Circle, in which Mae Holland joined the eponymous social media company, a mashup of Facebook and Google, and rose through its ranks. It opens after the Circle has acquired an e-commerce behemoth named after a South American jungle and rebranded itself as the Every hinting as it did at ubiquity and equality. This time, our heroine is Delaney Wells, who joins the company with the goal of finishing its malignant reign on earth. She plans to destroy it from the inside by seeding ideas so repellent that rational people will surely turn away in droves. Humanity, she reasons, will finally turn away from the endless violations of decency, privacy, monopoly, the consolidation of wealth and power and control.

One of Delaneys most diabolical suggestions is Friendy, an app that measures the trustworthiness of ones friends by analysing facial expressions, eye contact and vocal intonations, assigning a numerical value to the quality of the friendship: Think of how much more genuine and authentic our friendships could be if we just apply the right metrics to them. But other ideas begin to proliferate, among them the introduction of a beauty metric for paintings, music, poetry or any art form and an app called HappyNow? designed to answer, in real time, whether the user was happy. Not even the development of sinister surveillance technology, HereMe (a Big Brother version of Alexa), designed to pre-empt abusive behaviour in the home by eavesdropping for key words, is considered a step too far.

Eggers sets out an Orwellian vision of a near future in which big tech has transformed proud and free animals humans and made them into endlessly acquiescent dots on screens. The Every is housed on a California campus with the look of a hastily assembled film set. The wholesale adoption of Lycra (every curve and bulge articulated) is a running gag that symbolises the abandonment of individuality. Large screens propagate Every ideology: Sharing Is Caring; Secrets Are Lies; The World Wants to Be Watched. Employees, known as Everyones, are burned out from unrelenting surveillance in the guise of self-improvement apps that monitor everything from physical activity to political correctness. Consumers sacrifice privacy on the altar of an endless accumulation of apps.

All of this should paint a terrifying picture, but it doesnt (though I will concede that the possibility of eye-tracking technology that prevents you skimming War and Peace is genuinely scary). The problem is that none of the characters is given anything resembling a personality, let alone an arc except for the purpose of tracking when they start to give in to the Everys ethos. There seem to be no inner lives. Not only are the characters subordinated to the plot, but they are subsumed entirely by the novels polemic, so theres nothing at stake. The Everys other problem is that in the wake of big techs own self-parodying behaviour Amazons anti-union scandals, the Elon Musk-Jeff Bezos space race, Facebooks rebranding as Meta and launch of the Metaverse satire begins to feel redundant. (Meta surely proved this with those October launch videos that launched a thousand memes.)

Eggers is a gifted writer who couldnt write a bad novel; even if this isnt a great one, it contains several funny sequences threaded together with skewer-sharp sentences: Everything God offered answers, clarity, miracles, baby names the internet does better The one question that could not be answered, until now, is Am I good? And it does administer a sharp Juvenalian lampooning of big-tech venality, though this would be far more successful were it not also so lengthy. During Delaneys probation period, an Everyone says: No book should be over 500 pages, and if it is over 500 pages, we found the absolute limit to anyones tolerance is 577. This kind of self-conscious metafictional wink is an Eggers hallmark, but here it had the distracting effect of reminding me that there were still 370 pages to go to reach his self-allotted 577, which made the novel feel 370 pages too long.

The result of all this is that The Every is often entertaining, but not effective. It issues an urgent injunction to save humanity without ever really evoking the kind of humanity that youd remember after turning the final page the kind that may be the only weapon we have in the fight against big-tech totalitarianism. Early on, when Delaney ponders possible ways to destroy the Every from the outside, her friend Wes deadpans: Maybe one of us writes a novel. What a shame, then, that this novel feels like a damp squib.

The Every is published by Hamish Hamilton (12.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

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The Every by Dave Eggers review big tech is watching you - The Guardian

Afrofuturism and the decline of our art museums nice use of the pronoun blares the headline of Gilbert T. Sewalls October 26 review in Spectator World, the international edition of the archconservative British magazine The Spectator. That imperious our gives the game away: The lesser breeds are desecrating the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Capitoline Hill of high (read: White) culture.

Sewall is a conservative chronicler of American decline. He tut-tuts, in all the usual outlets (The American Conservative, The American Spectator, National Review), about the dire state of the nation, affecting that rueful but knowing tone every patrician right-winger aspires to. Imagine William F. Buckley in a toga, channeling Edward Gibbon in the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and youve got the general idea:

The hill of the Capitol, on which we sit, was formerly the head of the Roman Empire, the citadel of the earth, the terror of kings . This spectacle of the world, how is it fallen! how changed! how defaced! The path of victory is obliterated by vines, and the benches of the senators are concealed by a dunghill.

Seventy-five and still fulminating, Sewall cranks out jeremiads like theres no tomorrow which there wont be, he assures us, if schools using children as critical race theory guinea pigs and Woke California (which is banning boys and girls toy sections in a monstrous scheme to erase gender) have their way. Now, hes spotted another sign of the end times: Afrofuturism in our Metropolitan Museum, of all places.

Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room (2021) is a collaboration between the production designer Hannah Beachler, best known for her Oscar-winning vision of Black Panthers Wakanda; consulting curator Dr. Michelle Commander, associate director and curator of the Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; and Met curators Ian Alteveer and Sarah E. Lawrence. The title alludes to African-American folktales about slaves who fled lives of bondage by (literally) taking flight. Beachler, Commander, and their collaborators use Afrofuturisms faith in the radical power of speculative fictions as their launch pad. Inspired by the 19th-century Black settlement of Seneca Village, which thrived a few hundred yards to the west of the Met until the city razed it in 1857, invoking eminent domain, to create Central Park, the installation imagines an alternate future for Senecas residents.

Its a magical-realist domestic interior where 19th-century household items from the Mets American wing, African objects from the same period, and works by contemporary African-American artists coexist in what the cultural theorist Saidiya Hartman calls a state of temporal entanglement the Afro-diasporic experience of historical time, in the world after slavery, as one in which the past, the present, and the future are not discrete and cut off from one another. As the curators note in their essay for the Mets quarterly Bulletin, the Afrofuturist period room invites museumgoers to recollect a disrupted past and reclaim an alternate future.

Sewall isnt having any of it. Before Yesterday We Could Fly comes from nowhere and no time and is therefore not really a period room, he grouses, with the irascible bafflement of Abe Simpson in an Oculus headset. Apparently, he didnt get the memo posted on the Mets website: Unlike these other spaces, this room rejects the notion of one historical period and embraces the African and African diasporic belief that the past, present, and future are interconnected Hes scandalized by what he sees as the curators flagrant disregard for historicism, denouncing them for abandoning their trust and abusing their artifacts. None of the objects I saw in the Afrofuturist period room, from the Dahomean royals staff, to the 19th-century Venetian glassware, to the nail-studded Kongo power figure, to William Coles Shine(2007), a witty exercise in Afro-surrealist bricolage that jigsaws a pile of shiny black high-heeled shoes into the uncanny likeness of a Cameroon mask, seemed especially abused. Of course, for Sewall any use other than the reverent display of worthy artifacts in context is abusive.

No surprise there: Conservatives want to conserve. If the dingy period room recreating the 18th-century bedroom from the Sagredo Palace, with its putti frolicking in the gloom, is the hill you want to die on, be my guest. But if you value history, shouldnt you value all histories? Yet Sewall begins his review with an eye-roll at the (for him) farcical notion of an Afrofuturist period room that transforms a 19th-century interior into a speculative future home of historically oppressed blacks and pours scorn, a few paragraphs later, on the rooms weepy, semi-fictional backstory of historical injustice.

He doesnt put historically oppressed and historical injustice in ironizing quotes; he doesnt have to. His readers will supply them. Far to the right and, if I know the Spectator, overwhelmingly White, they share Sewalls indignant contempt for the spirit of the times, as he calls it, when some in White America are beginning to confront the racism, personal and institutional, that is part of this nations DNA. For Sewall and his readers, the very idea of historically oppressed blacks, in this best-of-all-possible post-racial worlds, is just so much weepy, semi-fictional liberal bunkum.

Ceding one square inch of the culture-war battlefield say, a small room at the Met to a hopeful myth that rewinds the demolition of a Black community and imagines a more radically empowered future for its inhabitants is mere pander[ing] to the current vogue for racial justice. From that pinched, parochial perspective, an Afrofuturist period room cant be anything more than a scheme to provide a racial learning moment for a maximum number of museumgoers clearly a bad thing or, better yet, an anti-historical fantasy in the Disneyland of social justice, like, you know, the Jungle Cruise, with its spear-chucking, headhunting Africans.

But what really winds him up is the curators reckless shift from preservation to political messaging. This is pretty rich, coming from the Antonin Scalia of cultural commentary. Sewall is nothing if not a rank ideologue, from his media appearances as the expert face of the American Textbook Council an innocuous-sounding independent, non-profit, research organization launched in the Reagan 80s and funded by ultraconservative foundations as part of a far-right strategy to beat back multiculturalism and any reckoning with the historical legacy of white supremacism to decades of paleoconservative diatribes about the LGBT lobby, trannies (who are, he implies, mentally ill), the calculated and cynical outrage of Black student race hustlers mau-mauing the administration at UCSD, and the trauma of white Americans, badgered ceaselessly, told to renounce their heritage and confess ancestral sins by diversitys inquisitors.

Sewall wants to make the Met great again. Under the new director, Max Hollein, activism and anti-European prejudices are alarmingly ascendant. In a gauntlet-throwing break with the historical lily-whiteness of the Mets curatorial staff, Hollein hired Denise Murrell, who is African American, for the position of associate curator for 19th- and 20th-century art. (That makes three full-time curators who identify as African American out of approximately 200 yet more evidence of Holleins brazen anti-European prejudice, no doubt.) Even more alarmingly, hes commissioning works by artists of color: Wangechi Mutus imposing bronze sculptures of Afro-alien women with lip plates and cyberpunk headgear, The NewOnes, will free Us (2019); the Cree artist Kent Monkmans Resurgence of the People (2019), a high-camp send-up of Emanuel Leutzes Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851) that replaces Washingtons soldiers with a boatload of Indigenous people and displaced migrants and the general himself with the artists gender-fluid, high-heel-wearing alter ego, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, whose name alone is enough to give Sewall fits.

Sewall yearns for the days when the Napoleonic director Philippe de Montebello kept an aristocratic eye peeled for outbreaks of political correctness and postmodernist trespassing across the border between high and low culture, worthy artifacts and now-art. But those days are behind us, and the mau maus and the trannies terms that mark the user, at this late date, as a dotard or a troll are inside the gates.

Right-wingers like Sewall will have to take courage in the Churchillian stoicism theyre always extoling and resign themselves to the decline of the Met another White Mans Burden, heroically borne.

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An Archconservative Magazine Discovers Afrofuturism at the Met and Is Not Pleased - Hyperallergic

Theres never been more choice about what to watch, from TV shows and documentaries to films and original series.

With the start of a new month, and Christmas just around the corner, the new additions to Netflix in November promise to be binge-worthy.

Each month, Netflix introduces a wide range of new title to the platform.

Here are 10 of the best new shows and films on Netflix this month. In the UK, new shows and films will be available to stream at 8:01am on day of release.

This list is in no particular order.

Big Mouth has been a huge hit on Netflix, and season five is set to drop on bonfire net. Expect fireworks.

Photo: Netflix

Joe Exotic vs Carole Baskin - the biggest personal grudge of century. Wondering what has happened to Joe since his imprisonment? You'll be able to find out on November 17. Tiger King 2 is sure to be wacky and bizarre as ever.

Photo: Netflix

The fifth season of popular animation F is For Family see comedian Bill Burr and Emmy award-winner Michael Price, transport back to the 1970s, a time when political correctness, helicopter parenting and indoor smoking bans werent part of the character's vocabulary.

Photo: Netflix

Sure to be another Netflix hit, Hellbound is a story about otherworldly beings who appear out of nowhere to issue a decree and condemn individuals to hell.

Photo: Jung Jaegu | Netflix

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10 of the best Netflix new release series available this November - The Scotsman