Archives for March 2018

“If you say something online, it has a different kind of permanence,” Ms. Papacharissi cautioned. “It’s always there to haunt you.”

So over the last two months, I decided to do something different by trying to erase that permanence. Specifically, I used web tools to eradicate the vast majority of my Facebook and Twitter posts. Those turned out to be impractical and tedious to use — though automated, the programs were flawed and missed many posts after several attempts. The chore took about five hours, spread out over weeks.

While I walked away from the ashes of my digital self feeling less haunted, I confess my methods may not be worth the trouble, though there are other, more practical solutions. Yet cleaning up your timeline is an exercise I recommend in moderation if you care about your privacy.

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Here’s how I did it — and what I learned.

Testing the Cleaners

Since Facebook and Twitter offer no simple method for doing a mass purging of timelines, you will likely have to rely on third-party tools. I picked two well-reviewed programs: TweetDelete for cleaning up my Twitter account and Social Book Post Manager for handling my Facebook account.

TweetDelete was simple to put to work. It’s a web app you install by visiting the tool’s website, tweetdelete.net, and authorizing the application to connect with your Twitter account.

From there, you can choose to delete tweets that are more than a week old. The app takes a few minutes to delete large batches of your tweets. One major caveat: Because of a technical limitation, TweetDelete can delete only the last 3,200 tweets on your account. So to clear out roughly 14,000 tweets that were more than a year old, I had to run the app four times. (I’ve had a lot to say on Twitter over the last decade, O.K.?)

My Facebook timeline was tougher to manage. After skimming my last 14 years’ worth of Facebook posts, I concluded there was nothing worth keeping. So I opted to purge everything.

I installed Social Book Post Manager, a free add-on for the Chrome web browser. This app was more rudimentary: It essentially scrolled through my timeline and clicked on the “delete” button for each of my posts for me.

Social Book Post Manager lets you delete months’ or years’ worth of content — or everything, which I chose. The problem was, even after I used the app to scrub through my entire timeline six times, the tool missed about a dozen posts. There is a setting to adjust the speed at which the app deletes posts, and I had to choose the minimum speed to do a complete purge.

The process was agonizing: I watched years of my youth play back in slow motion, including dated, satirical jokes and photos of myself wearing vintage clothing back when that was a fashion trend, before the tool deleted each post one at a time.

Is It Worth the Effort?

After I finished scrubbing my Facebook timeline, I concluded that my delete-everything approach was probably not worth most people’s time. And even after all that time, my Facebook timeline was still decorated with posts that my friends had published about me — including photos from my 21st birthday (need I say more?) — because that content was not mine to delete.

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Gennie Gebhart, a researcher who follows privacy and surveillance issues for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital-rights nonprofit, found a simpler approach. She connected her Facebook and Twitter accounts with the app Timehop.

To help people reminisce, Timehop every day surfaces photos and posts published from years past on Twitter and Facebook. Ms. Gebhart uses the tool to incrementally audit her timeline to see if there was something from the past she might not want lingering around.

She said that she rarely found posts worth deleting, but that most people might enjoy this light exercise for peace of mind — and to protect their public reputations.

Facebook representatives said that based on feedback, the company recognized that people had different needs for managing their timelines. So it offers a privacy setting for people to limit the visibility of their older timeline posts. Similar to Timehop, Facebook also occasionally surfaces old memories from people’s timelines to help them reminisce.

Twitter did not respond to requests for comment.

Beyond the technological difficulties of doing a social media purge, you may decide it’s not right for you. Ms. Papacharissi, the communication professor, said people formed sentimental attachments to their memories on social media, as they do with clothing and old photographs.

“They present a timeline of who we were, of who we are now and who we would like to be,” she said. “It’s like this always-on story. It’s difficult to disconnect that.”

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Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/28/technology/personaltech/social-media-timeline.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

John Legend (Jesus)

Photo

On religion I grew up in a Pentecostal Christian family, pretty fundamentalist. My grandfather was my pastor growing up. My dad is a pastor himself and played drums in the church choir, my mother was a choir director, and my grandmother was the church organist. My dad would even play Jesus in some of our passion plays in church. I’m not religious now, I would say, but there’s no way that you are raised in that environment, and also grow up singing that music, without it having an impact on your life.

On musicals My first contact with Andrew Lloyd Webber was in a show choir, “Glee”-style, where we would sing show tunes. And I was in a few actual theater productions — “Big River,” “Fiddler on the Roof,” and “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown” — when I was in high school. The hardest part now was just learning all the material — I’m so used to performing songs that I wrote for myself.

On Jesus Preparing for this particular role is not just about understanding historical Jesus. A lot of it goes back to thinking about love, and what that means — love for the people who are close to you, but also for mankind, and what that means when it comes to thinking about the sacrifice that he was willing to make.

On ‘Superstar’ The show is an interesting conceit — the idea of thinking about the real human emotions that someone that a lot of people see as a deity may have felt; the idea that he might have felt doubt and fear and resentment toward his father; the idea that he was betrayed by his friends. And, in this show, Andrew and Tim suggest that Judas may have had a point — Judas may have had really good reasons for questioning Jesus’s m.o.

Brandon Victor Dixon (Judas)

Photo

On religion I grew up in the Episcopal Church, went to private school in that church, went to chapel every day. It was a constant through my adolescence. Then we started to shift, to the Unitarian church. Now, spirituality plays a role in my life, but not religion. For me religion is a political construct, and spirituality is a community construct, and there’s a real difference.

On musicals I work in musical theater because people keep writing quality stories in the genre, and I’m really all about investing in a piece that says something about our current time, that is a reflection on who we are today.

On Judas What I’ve learned is that Judas is far less culpable of the things that he is accused of than people assume. Judas feels acutely a perversion of the message, and he also feels the danger of the message getting out of control — of dedication and love and unity and community turning into fanaticism and zealotry.

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On ‘Superstar’ I had never seen the show, had never heard the soundtrack — I really had no clue until I got this job. I watched the movie up until Judas was dead — that probably says something about my own personal character — and then we were in rehearsal and I overheard the musical director saying something about ‘You know, after Judas comes back’ — and I was like, ‘What? Judas comes back?’ And I went home and I finished the movie and found out Judas comes back and sings the best song in the entire show. I was floored.

Sara Bareilles (Mary Magdalene)

Photo

On religion I’m definitely someone who has faith and a belief in God and the workings of the universe at large, but I don’t subscribe to a particular doctrine. I grew up Catholic, and I went to Catholic school, so the story of Jesus and the crucifixion are very near and dear to my heart. I still go to Catholic Mass with my parents when I go home. The ritual and the familiarity and the comfort of our church community growing up is something I look back on really fondly now, even though I don’t go to church any more.

On musicals It’s this medium that exists somewhere between feet-on-the-ground and lifting off. It’s sort of elevated reality, where you get to tell really beautiful stories, but everything is slightly surreal, and I really love what unlocks emotionally for people.

On Mary Magdalene She’s actually a very powerful figure, and she is really motivated by her love for Jesus and his message. Historically, she was definitely a disciple and a believer and a champion of his message. She’s got laser focus on her support of Jesus, in my interpretation, and that’s how I’m coming to it, with a pure sense of the ultimate kind of love for someone.

On ‘Superstar’ I rented the film — I was probably 12 or 13 and I was really into a lot of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musicals at the time, and I was listening to everything I could get my hands on. I remember just being really emotional about the music. What was so avant-garde and so revolutionary about Tim and Andrew’s approach was that they really emphasized the humanity of these figures that have become so mythologized for us over the years. For someone who grew up in the church, as intimate as your relationship to Jesus can be, it’s really interesting and nuanced to look at him as a human and to look at Mary as a human and Judas as a human.

Alice Cooper (King Herod)

Photo

On religion My dad was a pastor. My grandfather was an evangelist. And my wife’s father is a Baptist pastor. I was basically the prodigal child — I grew up in the church, went as far away as you could possibly go, and then came back. When I got sober, I started understanding — I had all the fame and the money and everything that went with it, but I started realizing what was important to me was my relationship with Jesus Christ, who I just absolutely torture in this show.

I study the Bible every morning. When I’m at home I have a Wednesday morning men’s Bible study. I pray before every show. I go to church every Sunday with my wife and kids. I don’t think I’ve ever been more happy in my life. People say, ‘Think of all you gave up to be a Christian.’ What did I give up? Dying of alcoholism? I’m not giving anything up. I’m giving it back, to him.

On musicals I am just fascinated by the musical. One of my Sirius stations is always Broadway. ‘A Chorus Line’ was one of the greatest ones. And ‘Guys and Dolls’ — my dad was a big fan of Damon Runyon.

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When I was 16, we had a band called The Spiders, in Phoenix, and we got a call for a production of ‘Bye Bye Birdie’ — ‘Would you guys be the Birdies?’ So we got to be in this run, in real theater. That may have been where the whole Alice Cooper theatrics came from.

On Herod I think he’s going to be sort of an Elvis impersonator — I’m all in gold, and I’ve got a gold suit on that fits really good. The director wants this guy to be half rock star, half king. That’s how I want to play this. This Herod is a swirling mass of paranoia and ego. He starts out being very egocentric, but he’s getting angrier and angrier as it goes along, and pretty soon at the very end he’s right in Jesus’s face — he’s so tired of this guy.

On ‘Superstar’ There has never been a character in history that has ever had more written about him than Jesus Christ. There’s an underlying thing that everybody still wants to know who this guy was.

Continue reading the main story

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/29/arts/john-legend-and-the-jesus-christ-superstar-cast-on-faith-and-musicals.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

John Legend (Jesus)

Photo

On religion I grew up in a Pentecostal Christian family, pretty fundamentalist. My grandfather was my pastor growing up. My dad is a pastor himself and played drums in the church choir, my mother was a choir director, and my grandmother was the church organist. My dad would even play Jesus in some of our passion plays in church. I’m not religious now, I would say, but there’s no way that you are raised in that environment, and also grow up singing that music, without it having an impact on your life.

On musicals My first contact with Andrew Lloyd Webber was in a show choir, “Glee”-style, where we would sing show tunes. And I was in a few actual theater productions — “Big River,” “Fiddler on the Roof,” and “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown” — when I was in high school. The hardest part now was just learning all the material — I’m so used to performing songs that I wrote for myself.

On Jesus Preparing for this particular role is not just about understanding historical Jesus. A lot of it goes back to thinking about love, and what that means — love for the people who are close to you, but also for mankind, and what that means when it comes to thinking about the sacrifice that he was willing to make.

On ‘Superstar’ The show is an interesting conceit — the idea of thinking about the real human emotions that someone that a lot of people see as a deity may have felt; the idea that he might have felt doubt and fear and resentment toward his father; the idea that he was betrayed by his friends. And, in this show, Andrew and Tim suggest that Judas may have had a point — Judas may have had really good reasons for questioning Jesus’s m.o.

Brandon Victor Dixon (Judas)

Photo

On religion I grew up in the Episcopal Church, went to private school in that church, went to chapel every day. It was a constant through my adolescence. Then we started to shift, to the Unitarian church. Now, spirituality plays a role in my life, but not religion. For me religion is a political construct, and spirituality is a community construct, and there’s a real difference.

On musicals I work in musical theater because people keep writing quality stories in the genre, and I’m really all about investing in a piece that says something about our current time, that is a reflection on who we are today.

On Judas What I’ve learned is that Judas is far less culpable of the things that he is accused of than people assume. Judas feels acutely a perversion of the message, and he also feels the danger of the message getting out of control — of dedication and love and unity and community turning into fanaticism and zealotry.

Advertisement

Continue reading the main story

On ‘Superstar’ I had never seen the show, had never heard the soundtrack — I really had no clue until I got this job. I watched the movie up until Judas was dead — that probably says something about my own personal character — and then we were in rehearsal and I overheard the musical director saying something about ‘You know, after Judas comes back’ — and I was like, ‘What? Judas comes back?’ And I went home and I finished the movie and found out Judas comes back and sings the best song in the entire show. I was floored.

Sara Bareilles (Mary Magdalene)

Photo

On religion I’m definitely someone who has faith and a belief in God and the workings of the universe at large, but I don’t subscribe to a particular doctrine. I grew up Catholic, and I went to Catholic school, so the story of Jesus and the crucifixion are very near and dear to my heart. I still go to Catholic Mass with my parents when I go home. The ritual and the familiarity and the comfort of our church community growing up is something I look back on really fondly now, even though I don’t go to church any more.

On musicals It’s this medium that exists somewhere between feet-on-the-ground and lifting off. It’s sort of elevated reality, where you get to tell really beautiful stories, but everything is slightly surreal, and I really love what unlocks emotionally for people.

On Mary Magdalene She’s actually a very powerful figure, and she is really motivated by her love for Jesus and his message. Historically, she was definitely a disciple and a believer and a champion of his message. She’s got laser focus on her support of Jesus, in my interpretation, and that’s how I’m coming to it, with a pure sense of the ultimate kind of love for someone.

On ‘Superstar’ I rented the film — I was probably 12 or 13 and I was really into a lot of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musicals at the time, and I was listening to everything I could get my hands on. I remember just being really emotional about the music. What was so avant-garde and so revolutionary about Tim and Andrew’s approach was that they really emphasized the humanity of these figures that have become so mythologized for us over the years. For someone who grew up in the church, as intimate as your relationship to Jesus can be, it’s really interesting and nuanced to look at him as a human and to look at Mary as a human and Judas as a human.

Alice Cooper (King Herod)

Photo

On religion My dad was a pastor. My grandfather was an evangelist. And my wife’s father is a Baptist pastor. I was basically the prodigal child — I grew up in the church, went as far away as you could possibly go, and then came back. When I got sober, I started understanding — I had all the fame and the money and everything that went with it, but I started realizing what was important to me was my relationship with Jesus Christ, who I just absolutely torture in this show.

I study the Bible every morning. When I’m at home I have a Wednesday morning men’s Bible study. I pray before every show. I go to church every Sunday with my wife and kids. I don’t think I’ve ever been more happy in my life. People say, ‘Think of all you gave up to be a Christian.’ What did I give up? Dying of alcoholism? I’m not giving anything up. I’m giving it back, to him.

On musicals I am just fascinated by the musical. One of my Sirius stations is always Broadway. ‘A Chorus Line’ was one of the greatest ones. And ‘Guys and Dolls’ — my dad was a big fan of Damon Runyon.

Advertisement

Continue reading the main story

When I was 16, we had a band called The Spiders, in Phoenix, and we got a call for a production of ‘Bye Bye Birdie’ — ‘Would you guys be the Birdies?’ So we got to be in this run, in real theater. That may have been where the whole Alice Cooper theatrics came from.

On Herod I think he’s going to be sort of an Elvis impersonator — I’m all in gold, and I’ve got a gold suit on that fits really good. The director wants this guy to be half rock star, half king. That’s how I want to play this. This Herod is a swirling mass of paranoia and ego. He starts out being very egocentric, but he’s getting angrier and angrier as it goes along, and pretty soon at the very end he’s right in Jesus’s face — he’s so tired of this guy.

On ‘Superstar’ There has never been a character in history that has ever had more written about him than Jesus Christ. There’s an underlying thing that everybody still wants to know who this guy was.

Continue reading the main story

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/29/arts/john-legend-and-the-jesus-christ-superstar-cast-on-faith-and-musicals.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Nevertheless, the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, an advocacy group that has campaigned against what it calls Cosmopolitan’s “hyper-sexualized and sexually objectifying” content, took some credit for the move on Tuesday, citing its “collaborative dialogue” with Walmart.

“This is what real change looks like in our #MeToo culture,” said Dawn Hawkins, the group’s executive director, in a statement.

A Cosmopolitan spokesman declined to directly address the group’s description but emphasized the publication’s focus on female empowerment.

“We are proud of all that the brand has achieved for women around the world in the areas of equality, health, relationships, career, politics and social issues,” he said in a statement.

The magazine, which will still be available for purchase on periodical racks on Walmart stores, has been a focus of the nonprofit group for years. In 2015, the organization started a campaign to get stores to shield Cosmopolitan’s headlines and covers behind blinders or wraps similar to those that frequently cover pornographic material.

At that time, it worked with Victoria Hearst, the granddaughter of William Randolph Hearst, who founded Cosmopolitan’s publisher, the Hearst Group. The joint effort appeared to be successful.

Ms. Hearst, who now runs a “Cosmo Hurts Kids” campaign aimed at stopping the sale of the magazine to children under 18, was not involved in the center’s current push, according to according to Haley Halverson, the organization’s vice president for advocacy and outreach.

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The group, which was founded in 1962 and was previously known as Morality in Media, has continued to focus on Cosmopolitan in part, Ms. Halverson said, because the magazine was “targeting young girls” with its messaging.

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“A young teenager who first picks up Cosmo is going to be attracted to the bubble gum pink cover and to stories about Selena Gomez and One Direction,” Ms. Halverson said. “But within the covers, Cosmo is filled with extremely explicit articles that detail things like sexting, pornography, group sex, public sex and other forms of risky sex that actually a lot of young girls today are being pressured to do before they’re ready.”

Ms. Halverson also said the group viewed its efforts as especially important in the midst of the continuing conversation around sexual harassment that was sparked by the #MeToo movement.

“Cosmopolitan really likes to wrap itself up in its faux feminist mystique where they’re claiming that because they’re talking about sex, it’s liberating to women,” she said. “But it’s time to raise the level of discourse and say, ‘Well, are they talking about sex in an actually empowering or productive way?’”

When asked, Ms. Halverson could not think of an example of a publication or media organization discussing sexuality in the manner she described.

The statement linking Cosmopolitan to #MeToo culture was met with some skepticism online. The magazine has written multiple articles about the #MeToo movement, as well as the sexual assault and consent issues at its center.

In an article for Vogue, Michelle Ruiz, a former sex and relationships editor at Cosmopolitan, wrote that the publication has long advocated for consensual adult sex and has recently shifted its focus to women’s sexual pleasure.

John Harrington, a publishing industry consultant who until 2015 published a newsletter covering the magazine business, linked Walmart’s decision to larger trends. As magazine sales continue to decline, Mr. Harrington said, it was likely that Cosmopolitan’s sales at Walmart were following that trend.

But he also said that the retailer historically had appeared more responsive than other retailers to pressure from outside groups.

In the past, “they have occasionally moved magazines like Cosmopolitan and Glamour on an issue-by-issue basis,” Mr. Harrington said.

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In 2003, Walmart announced plans to obscure the covers of those two publications, as well as Redbook and Marie Claire. That same year, its stores also stopped selling the men’s magazines Maxim, Stuff and FHM after pressure from Christian groups.

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Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/28/business/media/walmart-cosmo.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Heineken pulled a series of commercials for light beer this week that featured the tagline “sometimes, lighter is better,” after one of the ads was criticized as racist.

The brewer, which became the latest company to face criticism over marketing that appears to support a preference for fair complexions, responded to the controversy on Monday.

“We missed the mark, are taking the feedback to heart and will use this to influence future campaigns,” Heineken U.S. said.

In the ad, a vigilant bartender spots a faraway female patron gazing disappointingly at a wine glass. Quickly, he opens a beer bottle and slides it down the bar.

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On its journey over multiple surfaces, the bottle skates past two black women and a black man before stopping at the wine glass. The phrase “sometimes, lighter is better” flashes on screen before the woman, who has lighter skin, inspects the bottle.

The ad, which appeared in a handful of markets, including the United States, Australia and New Zealand, belonged to a series that was introduced in early March on television and online. Heineken decided to drop the line of commercials on Monday.

The musician Chance the Rapper distilled much of the criticism in a series of tweets a day earlier, calling the ad “terribly racist.”

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Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/28/business/media/heineken-racist-ad.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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At least for a night, America said it really did want more “Roseanne.”

The revival of the vintage ABC sitcom got off to an enormously strong start on Tuesday night, drawing 18.2 million viewers and a 5.1 rating among adults under 50, according to Nielsen. The “Roseanne” numbers rank as the highest total of any comedy on the broadcast networks since the 2014 season premiere of “The Big Bang Theory.”

For comparison’s sake, NBC’s reboot of “Will Grace” in September drew a little over 10 million viewers and a 3.0 rating among 18- to 49-year-olds. Earlier this month, ABC’s revival of “American Idol” reached an audience of 10.3 million viewers and scored a 2.3 rating in the prize demographic. Both debuts were cause for celebration at both broadcast networks.

The “Roseanne” numbers, however, are in an entirely different category and stand to grow when delayed viewing is factored in.

Many TV industry executives were divided on whether or not a new version of “Roseanne” would take off. Though the industry has been in a reboot craze for the last two years (series like “Full House,” “Twin Peaks,” “The X-Files,” “One Day at a Time” and “Murphy Brown,” have all been brought back to life), the results have ranged from “meh” to solid.

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Unlike those shows, “Roseanne” has seemingly appealed to viewers for reasons having nothing to do with nostalgia: In interviews leading up to the sitcom’s premiere, the show’s Emmy-winning star, Roseanne Barr, made it clear that she was a supporter of President Trump and let it be known that her program would grapple with a hot political moment that has divided some American families.

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“I’ve always had it be a true reflection of the society we live in,” Ms. Barr said during a Television Critics Association press event in January. “Half the country voted for him, half of them didn’t. It’s just realistic.”

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Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/28/business/media/roseanne-revival-wins-huge-tv-ratings.html?partner=rss&emc=rss