In June, Mr. Chapek abruptly fired Disney’s top television executive, to howls of disapproval from Hollywood. In August, the activist investor Dan Loeb pushed Mr. Chapek to consider a range of changes, including shaking up the board and spinning off ESPN. (On Sunday, Mr. Loeb backtracked on a spinoff, saying on Twitter that he had learned more about Disney’s “growth and innovation plans” for ESPN.)

All the while, some of Disney’s most dedicated theme park customers have been growing indignant over price increases they see as nickel and diming. Last month, Disney told investors that theme park profits would have been even higher if not for an “unfavorable attendance mix” at Disneyland, which annual pass holders took as an affront. T-shirts, mugs and stickers began selling online bearing the word “Unfavorables” in Disneyland’s signature calligraphy.

Hence the effort to use D23 Expo to polish Mr. Chapek’s terrible, horrible, no-good, very-bad image.

Mr. Chapek’s attempt at a brand overhaul can be attributed, partly, to Kristina Schake, who joined Disney as chief communications officer in April. Ms. Schake, who previously helped recast public images for political figures, including Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton, was attached to Mr. Chapek’s hip as he traversed the more than one million square feet of the D23 Expo. (She brought eight pairs of shoes.)

Ms. Schake convinced him to keep his beard after noticing that he had grown one on vacation. Detractors in Hollywood have snidely suggested that the outcropping makes Mr. Chapek resemble Thanos, the Marvel supervillain. But GQ magazine has given its blessing, with a headline on Friday saying that Mr. Chapek was “rocking the rare corporate power beard.”

D23 is a reference to 1923, the year Walt Disney arrived in Hollywood. The event is both awe-inspiring and terrifying to witness because it showcases how deeply the company’s products, mythmaking and characters are woven into the cultural fabric. One area is dedicated to Disney’s television operation, which has 300 television shows in production. Disney has a new residential housing business. It owns National Geographic. With resorts in Europe, China, Florida and California, the sun never sets on a Disney theme park.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/11/business/media/bob-chapek-disney-expo.html

Can a Network Show Actually Win Best Comedy?

On the one hand, it seems inevitable that “Ted Lasso,” the feel good Apple TV+ sports comedy, will repeat for outstanding comedy. After all, when Emmy voters find a show they like, they usually stick with it. (John Oliver’s HBO show has won the best talk show category six years in a row.)

However, as with the drama race, there are a pair of viable upset candidates: “Only Murders in the Building,” the Hulu comedy about a murder mystery in a swanky Manhattan apartment building, and “Abbott Elementary,” the big-hearted ABC comedy about a group of elementary school teachers. The second season of “Only Murders” streamed during the Emmy voting period, keeping it fresh in the minds of Emmy voters.

The Television Critics Association sent a loud statement last month when it named “Abbott Elementary” its program of the year, with the show besting formidable contenders like “Succession” and “The White Lotus.” And then “Abbott” took the best casting award for a comedy last weekend at the Creative Arts Emmys. That’s a promising sign — the best casting winner has taken the best comedy award for seven consecutive years.

If “Abbott Elementary” does win, it would snap a long dry spell for the broadcast networks. The last network show to win best comedy was “Modern Family” eight years ago. And if Quinta Brunson, a creator and star of “Abbott Elementary,” beats out last year’s winner, Jean Smart (“Hacks”), for best actress in a comedy, it would make her the first network star to take the category since Melissa McCarthy won it in 2011 for the CBS half-hour “Mike Molly.” Brunson would also be the first Black woman to capture the award since Isabel Sanford (“The Jeffersons”) won in 1981.

‘The White Lotus’ Faces Off Against ‘Dopesick’ in Best Limited Series

Last year, Emmy producers made official what everyone already knew: The best limited series is now right up there with best drama as the most prestigious award in television. At the ceremony last year, the limited series award was the final category presented, breaking from the usual tradition of handing out the last statuettes to best drama.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/11/arts/television/emmys-2022-how-to-watch.html

Narcotics were what took Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison — all at the age of 27. When Elvis goes, it’s “our equivalent of a five-alarm fire,” Wenner writes, four days before deadline, after a move to New York offices in 1977. The murder of John Lennon, a Wenner favorite, is what finishes his ’60s idealism, and he continues to bathe the Beatle in white light here, glossing over the harm to their friendship caused by his publishing the acidic interview “Lennon Remembers” in book form, and the magazine’s partisan mistreatment of Paul McCartney’s brilliant early solo efforts.

“Like a Rolling Stone” does gather moss, it turns out: celebrities in damp clumps — from when Jann, born Jan in January 1946 and a real handful, is treated by Dr. Benjamin Spock, to “the black-tie family picnic” of his induction into the Rock Roll Hall of Fame he helped erect.

His father was a baby formula magnate; his mother helped with the business but was also a novelist and free spirit whom he compares to Auntie Mame; and the newspaper young Wenner ran at boarding school had a gossip column. A career headline spinner who hired and fired with gusto, he writes here in crisp sentences more descriptive than introspective, giving résumés for even minor characters.

“The apple cart was balanced,” he shrugs of the double life he long led — till Nye’s declaration of love, and the times a-changin’, tips it over.

Though his journalists regularly championed the downtrodden, Wenner proudly recounts a life of unbridled hedonism, and seems disinclined to reconcile any contradiction. His staffers aggressively cover climate change while he revels in his Gulfstream (“My first flight was alone, sitting by myself above the clouds listening to ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’”). At the 60th-birthday party he throws at Le Bernardin, the fancy Manhattan fish restaurant, Bruce Springsteen gets up and sings of the honoree that “Champagne, pot cookies and a Percocet/Keep him humming like a Sabre jet.” A private chef makes pasta sauce for the Wenner entourage at Burning Man. Wenner and Bono wave to each other from their Central Park West terraces, and join McCartney for a midnight supper by the “silvery ocean.” (“Stars — they’re just like us!,” per another former Wenner property, Us Weekly.)

Were there better ways for Johnny Depp to spend a million dollars than shooting the longtime Rolling Stone fixture Hunter S. Thompson’s ashes out of a cannon the height of the Statue of Liberty, as Wenner watched approvingly? Surely.

“Like a Rolling Stone” is entertaining in spades but only sporadically revealing of the uneven ground beneath Wenner’s feet. Long sections of the book read like a private-flight manifest or gala concert set list. You, the common reader, are getting only a partial-access pass.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/11/books/jann-wenner-like-a-rolling-stone-memoir.html

Narcotics were what took Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison — all at the age of 27. When Elvis goes, it’s “our equivalent of a five-alarm fire,” Wenner writes, four days before deadline, after a move to New York offices in 1977. The murder of John Lennon, a Wenner favorite, is what finishes his ’60s idealism, and he continues to bathe the Beatle in white light here, glossing over the harm to their friendship caused by his publishing the acidic interview “Lennon Remembers” in book form, and the magazine’s partisan mistreatment of Paul McCartney’s brilliant early solo efforts.

“Like a Rolling Stone” does gather moss, it turns out: celebrities in damp clumps — from when Jann, born Jan in January 1946 and a real handful, is treated by Dr. Benjamin Spock, to “the black-tie family picnic” of his induction into the Rock Roll Hall of Fame he helped erect.

His father was a baby formula magnate; his mother helped with the business but was also a novelist and free spirit whom he compares to Auntie Mame; and the newspaper young Wenner ran at boarding school had a gossip column. A career headline spinner who hired and fired with gusto, he writes here in crisp sentences more descriptive than introspective, giving résumés for even minor characters.

“The apple cart was balanced,” he shrugs of the double life he long led — till Nye’s declaration of love, and the times a-changin’, tips it over.

Though his journalists regularly championed the downtrodden, Wenner proudly recounts a life of unbridled hedonism, and seems disinclined to reconcile any contradiction. His staffers aggressively cover climate change while he revels in his Gulfstream (“My first flight was alone, sitting by myself above the clouds listening to ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’”). At the 60th-birthday party he throws at Le Bernardin, the fancy Manhattan fish restaurant, Bruce Springsteen gets up and sings of the honoree that “Champagne, pot cookies and a Percocet/Keep him humming like a Sabre jet.” A private chef makes pasta sauce for the Wenner entourage at Burning Man. Wenner and Bono wave to each other from their Central Park West terraces, and join McCartney for a midnight supper by the “silvery ocean.” (“Stars — they’re just like us!,” per another former Wenner property, Us Weekly.)

Were there better ways for Johnny Depp to spend a million dollars than shooting the longtime Rolling Stone fixture Hunter S. Thompson’s ashes out of a cannon the height of the Statue of Liberty, as Wenner watched approvingly? Surely.

“Like a Rolling Stone” is entertaining in spades but only sporadically revealing of the uneven ground beneath Wenner’s feet. Long sections of the book read like a private-flight manifest or gala concert set list. You, the common reader, are getting only a partial-access pass.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/11/books/jann-wenner-like-a-rolling-stone-memoir.html

“David would be very impressed with this film,” he added.

What Morgen didn’t realize was how much making the film would change him, especially after he had a debilitating heart attack, at 47. He flatlined and was in a coma for a week, he said in a phone interview. He emerged with a mind-set that shaped his approach to the story and refocused his own life, as a married father of three. Perversely, the driven Bowie helped Morgen, now 53, a fellow workaholic, find equilibrium.

And he needed it, when he was editing, entirely solo, during the first peak of Covid (his health scare made him extra-cautious). “I was sitting alone in this building, making a film about an artist whose stock in trade is isolation, and how to channel it creatively,” he said. “So I felt that he was consistently describing the world that I was inhabiting.”

Early on, he had visited Visconti in his New York studio. “We were in the room where he recorded David doing ‘Blackstar,’” the album Bowie released two days before his death, Morgen said. “It was quite intense.” Visconti played him “Cygnet Committee,” a prog-y folk-rock track off Bowie’s second album, stripping out vocals. The song, written when Bowie was around 22, ends with a repeated lyric: “I want to live.”

“David was crying throughout the performance,” Morgen said.

That sort of emotion — ravenous and vulnerable — set the tone for the film. “Moonage Daydream” was five years in the making. It took Morgen and his team over a year just to transfer hours of concert and performance footage, images of Bowie’s paintings and other content from the Bowie estate, along with additional footage acquired by Morgen’s archivist, and about two years to watch it all.

But the movie is hardly completist. There are no interviews with anyone else, and no mention of, for example, Iggy Pop, whom Bowie holed up with in Berlin during one of his most creatively fertile periods, or Nile Rodgers, who helped him reinvent his career as a pop artist in the ’80s. The sexual voraciousness and drug addiction that usually feature heavily in Bowie’s story are referenced only with montages and jumpy interview clips. (“Do I need to spell it out? It seems kind of blatant to me,” Morgen said of one where Bowie appears sweating and grinning maniacally.) Though the movie dips into his childhood and family, it glosses over his personal life until his marriage to Iman, the model and entrepreneur.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/09/movies/david-bowie-documentary-moonage-daydream.html

The idea behind the Fairphone is that if you want a phone with new technology, you can get it without having to replace your current device entirely — and if something goes wrong with the phone, like you drop it, it can be easily fixed. That makes the Fairphone the antithesis of most smartphones today and shows how tech companies can design the gadgets differently, for durability and sustainability.

How it could be with the hardware

Take your iPhone or Android phone and look at it closely. Notice how it is shut tight with unique screws that require special screwdrivers. Apple even invented its own screw.

But the Fairphone comes with a small screwdriver that invites you to open up the phone. So, when I began testing it, that was the first thing I did.

Taking the Fairphone apart turned out to be a breeze. Removing its plastic cover revealed its camera, battery, speakers and other components. They were held in place with ordinary screws that could be quickly taken out with the screwdriver. In less than five minutes, I removed all of those parts. In about the same amount of time, I reassembled the phone.

The experience of taking the phone apart was empowering. I had the confidence that if I had to do a repair or some basic maintenance, like swapping in a new camera or battery, I could do so in minutes and for cheap. (Fairphone charges $30 for a new battery and $80 for a new camera.)

Disassembling my iPhone, on the other hand, was a nightmare.

When I took the Apple device apart during a previous test, it involved removing the proprietary screws with a special screwdriver and melting the glue that held the case together. To remove the battery, I had to use tweezers to yank on the tiny strips of glue underneath it. Even though I eventually succeeded in replacing the battery, I broke the iPhone’s screen in the process — and a replacement display cost about $300.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/08/technology/personaltech/smartphone-lasts-decade.html

Since 2004, Timothy Krueger has taught history to younger teenagers in the North Syracuse district in upstate New York. His students once raised a bogus TikTok conspiracy theory that Helen Keller faked her blindness and deafness. Others had said they were unvaccinated against Covid-19 because their parents had told them, inaccurately, that the shot would make them infertile.

Mr. Krueger began including more lessons about evaluating evidence and fact-checking. In November, a pilot program he helped design with the American Federation of Teachers will be piloted in Cleveland, helping in part to train educators to teach media and information literacy using “safe” methods to shield them from harassment.

“We’re under attack — it’s now such an openly polarized society, where teachers are afraid to talk about hot topics or controversial issues,” Mr. Krueger said.

But, he added, teachers are “Step 1” in showing young people how to think clearly for themselves: “If we want them to be a truly intelligent constituency, we have to start now.”

New educational efforts are constantly being deployed. Twitter and Google have so-called pre-bunking initiatives to warn users about common misinformation tactics. The nonprofit News Literacy Project, which said the number of students using its free Checkology curriculum surged 248 percent between 2018 and 2022, recently introduced a short elections misinformation guide on Flip, a video-based online platform for teachers.

But Peter Adams, a former teacher who heads research and design for the News Literacy Project, is pushing for a broader consensus on the types of skills students should learn and the results educators want. Without it, he worries that lessons could backfire.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/08/technology/misinformation-students-media-literacy.html