Everyone’s Gone To The Movies: 2024 Oscars Edition

Some thought’s from last night’s Oscar broadcast.

  • People often tell me I see connections between movies that no one else does. For example I think that Rober Zemeckis’ Contact and Ridley Scott’s Prometheus tell thematically similar stories. And I have argued at length that Star Wars Episode 2: Attack of the Clones is essentially an extended tribute to the early films of Ridley Scott. For the record, I know I’m right on Episode 2, and I think I have a strong argument on Prometheus. This year after seeing the brilliant and disturbing Poor Things, I saw connections between it and last year’s Best Picture nominee Triangle of Sadness. Both deal with the conflicts between economic and social classes, and how women can acquire both social and sexual power. Both also have highly disturbing scenes in which the power dynamic changes suddenly. After watching last night’s Oscar telecast, I also realized that Poor Things Bella Baxter (played by Oscar winner Emma Stone) has a lot in common with Margo Robbie’s Barbie. Both characters become gradually aware of deep issues about their existence as they move from being little more than a toy into fully realized human beings. They also both have to come to terms with themselves as sexual beingsWhat do you think?

    Margot Robbie from Barbie, Emma Stone from Poor Things, and Dolly de Leon from Triangle of Sadness.

    Margot Robbie from Barbie, Emma Stone from Poor Things, and Dolly de Leon from Triangle of Sadness.

  • Like my Dear Wife and college friend Rich Ness, I wonder why the Academy had an elaborate interpretive dance number going on during the In Memoriam segment. It was almost as if the producers didn’t trust the audience to care enough about cinematic history to stay tuned in. The presentation on TV actually made it hard to see who was being remembered. To me, this is one of the best segments of the show. Fill the screen with names and images.

  • I’m a big fan of short films. And while I do not doubt for a minute that Wes Anderson made a brilliant series of short films for Netflix, I really didn’t like him taking home the Oscar. Not because his short lacked merit. I just think that shorts are place for filmmakers just entering into the industry to have a chance to make their mark. Of course an iconic director with access to a top notch crew and a strong budget can make a winning film.But that’s not really the question. I felt the same way when Kobe Bryant’s Dear Basketball, an animated short I adore, won. I mean how is an indie animator supposed to compete with a film directed and animated by Disney legend Glen Keane and scored by John Williams.

  • It’s ok to give an Oscar for Best Song to a tune that is fun and makes you want to sing along. This is no slight to Billy Ellish and her brother Foinneas O’Connell who have won two Best Song trophies for relatively downbeat songs in 2021 and 2023. But if you think about which song defined the summer hit Barbie, it was Ryan Gosling’s I’m Just Ken that had everyone talking, not Elish’s What Was I Made For.  I thought Disney botched it back in 2021 when they nominated Dos Oruguitas from Encanto rather than We Don’t Talk About Bruno that both charted and was on every child’s lips.

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Interesting Columnists – 2024

Do you have someone you think I should add here? Send me a note and I’ll add them to a future post.

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What happens when a library burns? Depends on what the books are made of

Covers of books about the history of books and libraries.How big of a book nerd am I? While researching book history this morning, I pulled these three volumes out of my personal library. Here’s some of what I found:


Canadian railroad economist Harold Innis wrote one of the most interesting books about the nature of media – Empire and Communications. In it, he argued that any given medium has a bias of lasting a long time or of being easy to distribute. In the ancient world, clay and stone would be durable media biased toward the concept of time, while papyrus and parchment writings were easy to distribute and thus biased toward space.

How well these writing surfaces preserve their documents is fascinating. Lionel Casson, writing in Libraries in the Ancient World, notes that if you burn a library full of papyrus or parchment, the documents all are reduced to ashes, but if the documents are inscribed onto clay tablets, a massive fire would bake the pages into a more permanent form – fired clay.(9e0877) Clay tablets also had the advantage of being inexpensive and easy to produce. They had the disadvantage, of course, of being heavy, bulky, and difficult to transport.

The Sumerian angular cuneiform writing style also worked well with being cut into soft clay. These date back to the third millennium BCE. And their survivability is part of the reason that so much of our early history of writing comes from clay tablets.

Among the most spectacular early documents was a collection of several thousand tablets that had been in a burned room in Syria, dating back to approximately 2300 BCE. While most of these tablets were inventories and business records, there were also tablets that were bilingual word lists, and a pair of tablets contained a copy of a Sumerian myth. Casson says that this was likely a palace scribe’s library.

The most famous of the ancient libraries was the one in Alexandria, Egypt, founded in about 300 BCE. Created by Aristotle, it had books on virtually every topic and was open to the public. At its peak, the library contained more than 490,000 scrolls, some of which contained multiple books or documents, and some of which were duplicates. A popular, but likely incorrect, story says the library burned in 48 BCE, but there is substantial evidence that at least a large part of the library lasted until 270 AD when heavy fighting in Alexandria burned much of the city, likely including the library.

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How Do Social Media Affect Young People?

Frances Haugen was a Facebook product manager whose job was to protect against election interference on the social media site. She worked at the company for nearly two years, departing in May of 2021. During her time at the social media company now known as Meta, she became disillusioned with her work, believing that Facebook was more concerned about “growth and user engagement” than about making sure the web site was a healthy place for people to go to for information.

Before working for Facebook, she had put in time working for Google and social media channel Pinterest. During this time she also had a close friend who radically changed his personality and beliefs after spending large amounts of time online reading material on forums about white nationalism and the occult. This experience made he start questioning how social media might affect young people.

“It’s one thing to study misinformation, it’s another to lose someone to it,” she said. “A lot of people who work on these products only see the positive side of things.”

During her last several months at Facebook, she dug through a large archive of company research and reports that were posted openly to the company’s intranet Facebook Workplace. These documents were the basis of a series of stories published in the Wall Street Journal that argue:

  • Facebook’s rules favor powerful elites, with the usual rules being ignored when it comes to powerful politicians and celebs.
  • The channel’s algorithms promote conflict by promoting engagement instead of reliable information.
  • Their services are used openly by bad actors such as drug cartels and human traffickers.
  • Instagram can have negative effects on vulnerable girls’ mental health.

Haugen eventually leaked six documents about internal research on the effects of Meta’s social media sites that were published about in a series of stories by the Wall Street Journal known as “The Facebook Files.

One of the biggest offenders, according to the Facebook Files, was photo-sharing service Instagram. The company’s own work showed that spending time on Instagram made body image worse for at least one-third of teen girl users. Closely connected were reports that Instagram posts focused heavily on “body image and lifestyle” and that they fostered excessive social comparison.

The Journal found that these negative social media effects tended to be connected specifically to Instagram:

“That is especially true concerning so-called social comparison, which is when people assess their own value in relation to the attractiveness, wealth, and success of others. The tendency to share only the best moments, a pressure to look perfect, and an addictive product can send teens spiraling toward eating disorders, an unhealthy sense of their own bodies, and depression, March 2020 internal [Meta] research states.” 

In response to criticism of how Instagram has engaged with teens and pre-teens, Meta has urged young people to have private accounts and is working at controlling which ads will be shown to them. The company has also said it is working on developing a new product for users under age 13, though as of this writing in the winter of 2024, Meta had only announced new controls on existing products.

The publication of the so-called Facebook Files led to congressional hearings, multiple states suing social media companies, and New York City declaring social media to be a public health hazard because of its effects on young people’s mental health.


According to a study by the Pew Research Center, parents have a wide range of concerns about potential negative effects of social media on teens that may or may not be supported by actual research:

• Being exposed to explicit content
• Wasting too much time on the sites
• Being distracted from completing homework
• Sharing too much about their personal life
• Feeling pressured to act in a certain way
• Being harassed or bullied
• Experiencing problems with anxiety, depression, or lower self-esteem

Parents of girls expressed more concern about problems with anxiety, depression and lower self-esteem than did parents of boys.

Research on social media concerns by parents from the Pew Research Center.


In 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General’s office published an advisory report on “Social Media and Youth Mental Health.” This report looks at both the negative and positive outcomes that might come from young people’s use of social media. In the study the Surgeon General’s office reviewed a wide range of studies, trying to put together a summary of what we know about the subject, as opposed to what teens, parents and politicians think they know.

Overall, the report found that social media is a near universal experience for teens, with nearly 95 percent of those 13-17 reporting using a social media platform. And while children under 13 are supposedly not allowed on social media, research shows that nearly 40 percent of those ages 8-12 use social media.

One clear finding of the study was that while social media may have a variety of effects on young people, “different children and adolescents are affected by social media in different ways, based on their individual strengths and vulnerabilities, and based on cultural, historical, and socio-economic factors.” (In fact, this statement could be applied to virtually all mass communication research every conducted.)

The Surgeon General’s report found that there are potential benefits to youth from using social media including providing connections with people who share similar interests and creating a place for self-expression. Social media can also give young people a chance to interact with a more diverse peer group than they would have access to otherwise. As an example, a 20-year-old Stanford University student said that she liked being able to follow other young women who use wheelchairs on Instagram, which was a positive influence for her.

On the negative side, the report found that adolescents who spent more than three hours per day on social media had double the risk of experiencing symptoms of such as depression and anxiety. One study reviewed in the report found that limiting social media exposure to 30 minutes a day led to “significant improvements in depression severity.”  The report also found support for concerns that social media content could help promote “body dissatisfaction, disordered eating, and depressive symptoms.”

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Ten Accounts I Follow on Threads

This week my JMC 406 Blogging and Commentary students were asked to do one of their first posts by listing 10 Threads accounts they are following and why. You can find my students’ posts using the #JMC406 hashtag. Here’s my swing at the assignment. I’m trying to avoid accounts my students are likely linking to:

  1. postopinions – From the Op/Ed pages of the WaPo
    Sharing a  range of editorials and opinion pieces from the Washington Post.
  2. dkiesow – Damon Kiesow
    Knight Chair in Journalism at Mizzou. Smart commentary on journalism and media business.
  3. grovesprof – Jonathan Groves
    Professor at Drury University and former journalist
  4. jeremyhl – Jeremy Harris Lipschultz
    Social media and journalism professor at UNO, Cubs fan, and media law commentator.
  5. karaswisher – Kara Swisher
    Journalist at the intersection of tech/politics/culture.
  6. oliverdarcy – Oliver Darcy
    Senior media reporter for CNN, produces the…
  7. cnnreliablesources feed.
    For years was the CNN weekly news media show. Now a newsletter.
  8. davidfrenchjag – David French
    Conservative, evangelical columnist for NY Times. Lawyer, veteran.
  9. thebadastronomer – Phil Plait
    Writes about astronomy and other science issues. Has been a speaker on the UNK campus on several occasions.
  10. sixuntilme – Kerri Sparling
    Kerri has been writing about living for diabetes for something like 20 years. She was one of the earliest diabetes bloggers. By the way, she is married to screenwriter Chris Sparling, who wrote the terrifying movie Buried staring Ryan Reynolds.
  11. rosannecash – Rosanne Cash
    Daughter of Johnny, one of my favorite musicians, fantastic performer
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Gerwig can’t overcome double whammy of directing a female-centric comedy

Gerwig (left) and Robbie, pictured at the Golden Globes, missed out on best director and best actress respectively. Click photo to go to BBC story. Getty Images

Greta Gerwig has directed three films since 2017, including Lady Bird, Little Women and the monster hit Barbie. All three were well regarded with multiple Academy Award nominations – but only the indie Lady Bird managed to score her a Best Director nomination. Now, I have no great insight into the Oscar nomination process, and I certainly haven’t seen all of the nominated films. But I take it as strange that a woman who has done so much with three films about women can’t get nominated for anything other than her small, indie movie.

Back in 2020, when Gerwig’s creative retelling of Little Women was in the running, I wrote:

I thought Little Women was one of the most enjoyable and interesting movies I saw all year.  And I say this as someone who had never read Little Women, nor did I know its most famous plot point. While much of the acting in it was spot on (especially from Florence Pugh who plays the difficult sister, Amy), this is clearly a film that belongs to director/screenwriter Greta Gerwig.  She got a well deserved best adapted screenplay nomination, but no nod for best director. She tells the story assuredly with a current and historic timeline that brought a new storytelling convention to a 150-year-old story.

But in 2020, and almost every other year, it took making a manly film about manly things to get Academy love, unless you are an indie or international film that makes no threat to the established order. I’m not even arguing that Gerwig should with the Oscar – I’m both predicting and rooting for Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. But the fact that the director of a groundbreaking musical comedy that plays with lots of complex ideas and still makes a giant bucket of money can’t even get a spot on the ballot seems nuts.

Best director:

  • Anatomy of a Fall – Justine Triet
  • Killers of the Flower Moon – Martin Scorsese
  • Oppenheimer – Christopher Nolan
  • Poor Things – Yorgos Lanthimos
  • The Zone of Interest – Jonathan Glazer

Beyond best director, here are my thoughts on some of the rest of the nominations:

Best Picture:

  • American Fiction
  • Anatomy of a Fall
  • Barbie
  • The Holdovers
  • Killers of the Flower Moon
  • Maestro
  • Oppenheimer
  • Past Lives
  • Poor Things
  • The Zone of Interest

No real complaints, though I think that it was arguable that Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse could have deserved a slot here.


Best actor:

  • Bradley Cooper – Maestro
  • Colman Domingo – Rustin
  • Paul Giamatti – The Holdovers
  • Cillian Murphy – Oppenheimer
  • Jeffrey Wright – American Fiction

I would be amazed if it went to anyone other than Murphy, though I admire Giamatti’s and Cooper’s performances.


Best actress:

  • Annette Bening – Nyad
  • Lily Gladstone – Killers of the Flower Moon
  • Sandra Huller – Anatomy of a Fall
  • Carey Mulligan – Maestro
  • Emma Stone – Poor Things

No love here for Barbie’s Margot Robbie, who did a great job of bringing a doll to life in a critique of the patriarchy, seems … odd.


Best supporting actress:

  • Emily Blunt – Oppenheimer
  • Danielle Brooks – The Color Purple
  • America Ferrera – Barbie
  • Jodie Foster – Nyad
  • Da’Vine Joy Randolph – The Holdovers

Thought Randolph’s performance as the grieving mother in The Holdovers was exceptional. I’m also pleased to see America Ferrara getting recognition for Barbie.


Best supporting actor:

  • Sterling K Brown – American Fiction
  • Robert De Niro – Killers of the Flower Moon
  • Robert Downey Jr – Oppenheimer
  • Ryan Gosling – Barbie
  • Mark Ruffalo – Poor Things

I really want to see Robert Downey Jr. get this for playing Oppenheimer antagonist Lewis Strauss. Ryan Gosling was excellent in Barbie, but how he got a nom when Robbie got passed by is beyond me. (Yes, I know, different categories, etc., but really?)


Best animated feature:

  • The Boy and the Heron
  • Elemental
  • Nimona
  • Robot Dreams
  • Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

I won’t get to see The Boy and the Heron for several more weeks, but I have no doubt that it is worthy of it’s spot on the list. I am so happy that Netflix and Annapurna Pictures managed to complete the queer-themed Nimona after Disney dropped it, and I’m delighted to see it with a nomination. (I had it on my top 10 list for 2023.) I was not impressed with Disney/Pixar’s Elemental, and I would have prefered to have seen the anime Suzume or the stylish Teen-Aged Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem in its place.  I assume Spider-Verse will win, and I have no complaint with that.


What did you think about this year’s nominations? Leave your thoughts in the comments.

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When Unions Dominate News Over Media Conglomerates

Usually when we talk about the media business we are talking about the actions of corporate giants like Disney and Paramount, but in the summer of 2023, it was the actions of the movie and television writers and actors unions that were making the news.

In mid-July, SAG-AFTRA members joined striking screenwriters on the picket lines outside Hollywood studios and streaming companies.
Mandalit del Barco/NPR News

For the first time since 1960 both the Screen Actors Guild (SAG-AFTRA) and the Writers Guild of America (WGA) were on strike at the same time against the Hollywood studios shutting down virtually all production and promotion of scripted movies and TV shows.

In the 1960 strike, the Screen Actors Guild was led by Ronald Reagan, who would go on to become the only union president to become president of the United States.  According to entertainment news magazine Variety:

In that strike, both the writers and actors were wrestling with compensation issues arising from the dawn of television. Together, they won residuals for TV reruns and for broadcast of films on TV and established the first pension and welfare plan.

A lot changed over the 60 years since the last double strike. This time the unions were dealing with the decline of legacy linear television and the move to streaming and digital video — a transition at least as transformational as the rise of broadcast television in the 1950s and 60s. They were also concerned about how artificial intelligence (AI) could be used to capture actors’ images and voices and turn them into on-screen performances without additional involvement by the actors.

Until the rise of streaming services, actors and writers could count on getting paid when a show or movie was initially created and screened or broadcast. They would then receive residual payments each time a show was aired on broadcast/cable TV as a syndicated rerun. (Think about how you might have watched old episodes of Friends, Seinfeld, or The Office in the afternoon on your local television station or on a cable channel such as TNT or TBS.)

For many writers and actors, there can be long gaps between big, successful projects, and the residuals are what help them pay the bills during those lean times. (Remember, for every high-paid star in Hollywood there are literally dozens of journeyman workers who are just hoping to make ends meet.)

For the 2023 strike, writers and actors had a number of new concerns:

  • They were calling for a bigger, better defined share of the income from streaming services such as Netflix, Disney+, Paramount Plus and Hulu. Given that’s where most viewing is moving, that’s where the people who work in the industry say they need to be getting more of their income.
  • Both writers and actors were worried about how studios might use artificial intelligence computer programs to write scripts or create photorealistic recreations of actors for movies or shows.
  • According to film and TV professor Andrew Susskind, TV shows traditionally have lasted 20-24 episodes a season, giving staff writers eight to 10 months of work per season. “And being around for all the episodes, it offers writers the opportunity to grow, because they’re there for script writing, they get to see preproduction, maybe get to see postproduction; so they get to learn production and maybe one day get to be producers or showrunners,” Susskind said.Now shows are more likely to have 10 or fewer episodes, and the writing staff will be smaller with more freelancers being brought in to work on just a single episode. This gives the writers employment of weeks rather than months.

These strikes, of course, delayed or canceled the production of a wide range of projects. The actors’ strike will also meant that the stars could not help promote  new movies or shows. The first of these to be hit was the Christopher Nolan summer blockbuster Oppenheimer, where stars Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Cillian Murphy and Florence Pugh were only available for a single red-carpet appearance before the strike sent them to the picket lines.

The studios saw things a bit differently than the unions, stating that the strikes were coming at “the worst time in the world,” according to Disney head Bob Iger. Speaking to CNBC, Iger said:

“There’s a level of expectation that [the unions] have that is just not realistic. And they are adding to the set of the challenges that this business is already facing that is, quite frankly, very disruptive.”

Although studio executives made snarky anonymous claims in the Hollywood press that they would simply wait out the strike “until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses,” in the end, the studios largely gave in to union demands. In separate contracts, both unions reached agreements for residuals for programming on streaming media, strict controls on how artificial intelligence can be used in producing content, and minimum staffing levels for writers’ rooms.

David Sims, culture writer for The Atlantic, argued that the reason the writers and actors could outlast the studios was that their financial situations were so bad they had nothing to lose by staying out on strike. The media companies, on the other hand, had nothing to put on screens or in theaters. As an example, over the Christmas holidays of 2023 my Dear Wife and I went to a local commercial theater to watch a re-release of Bruce Willis’ 1988 thriller Die Hard, which was showing because there simply weren’t enough new movies to fill the limited number of screens we have in our small, Midwestern town. These delays were particularly rough for the media giants that had been forced just three years earlier to delay large numbers of big movies because of theaters closed for the COVID pandemic.

With both writers and actors back on the job, the question is now what will the working relationship be between producers and creatives in Hollywood? Actor and SAG-AFTRA strike captain Chelsea Schwartz posed the question to NPR, “How do you go from being so angry at these people to being, like ‘and we’re best buds now, working together on set?’ We forgive, but you don’t forget.”

 

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When Scholastic Book Fairs Got Segregated (and then Desegregated Again… Maybe)

Scholastic Book Fair signThe Scholastic Book Fair is a long-running rite of passage for K-12 students in the United States when the educational publishing giant sets up big displays of books for sale at schools across the country. For your author, the Scholastic Book Club orders that came every month or two were high points of the the year, especially in grade school. (The book fairs didn’t start until 1981 when I was in college.) But in order for Scholastic to bring these thousands of books to students across the country, they have to stay in business.

During 2023, Scholastic placed a large number of books into a group called, “Share Every Story, Celebrate Every Voice,” which sounds like a good thing when more than 30 states were facing efforts to keep books dealing with racial justice or sexuality out of schools. But Scholastic admitted that the collection existed so that states that “prohibit ‘certain kinds of books’ from schools” could keep these diverse books out of the sale.   Scholastic initially defended having the separate collection, saying that the new laws in states banning such books from schools create “an almost impossible dilemma: back away from these titles or risk making teachers, librarians, and volunteers vulnerable to being fired, sued, or prosecuted…. We don’t pretend this solution is perfect – but the other option would be to not offer these books at all – which is not something we’d consider.”

Among the books in the collection were:

  • The ABCs of Black History
  • Biographies of Rep. John Lewis, Ruby Bridges, and Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson
  • Change Sings, a picture book by poet Amanda Gorman with illustrations by Loren Long.

In a post on Instagram, Gorman reacted in sadness to the news that her book was on the segregated list:

“It took me a while to sit in what felt like a betrayal. As an elementary student, for weeks I’d save every single penny I had for the Scholastic Book Fair, because it felt like a free place that invited me to explore and choose for myself what books I wanted to read, what worlds I wanted to access, what stories I could finally find myself reflected within. It was one of the magical moments that made me want to write books for children in the first place.

“But the true depth of my disappointment came when I read about all the amazing, impactful books – predominantly by Black, brown, queer, and disabled authors – that won’t make it into the schools because there is now a clear pathway for prohibiting them from general access.”

But following extensive criticism from free speech and children’s groups, Scholastic decided to stop segregating the Share Every Story books into a separate collection that could easily be excluded. How will the company handle future complaints about books covering diversity and LGBTQ+ issues? That remains to be seen.


A similar controversy was sparked in North Carolina’s Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district when district officials told principals not to have their schools participate in events tied to the American Library Association’s annual Banned Book Week. The message to principals said, “It is not something we teach in our classrooms or as supplementary material for out of school learning.”  The district was also concerned that discussion of banned books might violate a new state law that said parents had the right to control what their children learned in school. Edward Helmore, writing for the British newspaper The Guardian, said that this might be the first time that “efforts to draw attention to banned books has itself been banned.

Once the story about “banning Banned Book Week” started to spread through national media outlets, the narrative within the district started to change, saying the message to individual schools was “for building-level administrators to use, if needed.” The district went on to say that any Banned Book Week observation was not a violation of the Parents Bill of Rights.


Image by Chantal Jahchan for The Washington Post; Getty Images

The Washington Post, in 2023, took a deep dive into the issue of who was objecting to books and what kinds of books did these people dislike? Reporters looked at more than 1,000 challenges filed during the 2021-22 school year from 150 school districts nationwide.

Topics objected to included a biographical book on assassinated gay San Francisco politician Harvey Milk, a story about a boy who dresses as a mermaid, and a story about a Black child’s reaction to a killing of a girl by police in his hometown.

Carol Tilley, a faculty member at University of Illinois, compares the current culture of book banning to a case in Alabama in the 1950s where adults objected to The Rabbit’s Wedding about a black and a white rabbit getting married. “That didn’t play well in segregationist states at the time,” Tilley said. “I think that you see a long pattern: Concerns tend to mirror whatever the big social changes are at any particular time.”

While challenges targeting books with LGBTQ+ themes have been around since the early 2000s, the number of objections were spiking by 2018 when they accounted for 16 percent of all challenges. That grew to 20 percent in 2020 and up to 45.5 percent in 2022, according to the Washington Post.

At the core of many of these objections to books presenting LGBTQ+ stories is that these will normalize gay, trans, queer and non-binary narratives and make children feel that such feelings and behavior are acceptable. This is sometimes referred to as “grooming” or encouraging young people to consider different approaches to sexuality. (This would also fall under Secret Three: Everything from the margin moves to the center. Want to review all of the Seven Secrets? Here’s the link!)

But according to Dr. Amy Egbert, who studies youth mental health, research doesn’t support the idea that reading about a topic can change something as basic as a person’s sexuality. “[W]e do have a lot of data about other topics that doesn’t lead us to think that reading a book would make a child suddenly become gay,” she said. But she went on to say that removing LGBTQ+ books could have negative effects. “Any time a certain identity is stigmatized, that tend to lead to more discrimination, more bullying, and increased mental health challenges.”

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Will we be extremists for love or hate? Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail

m" One of the greatest honors of my life was being invited to speak at the Martin Luther King, Jr. candlelight vigil several years ago at the UNK student union, along with KevinThe question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice?... The nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists." Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr National Museum of African American History & Culture

One of the greatest honors of my life was being invited to speak at the Martin Luther King, Jr. candlelight vigil several years ago at the UNK student union, along with Kevin Chaney, who was then UNK’s women’s basketball coach. 

Here’s what I had to say about Dr. King when I spoke:

Visalli-11-10-13When we think of public relations, we think of a professional in a suit trying to persuade us about something related to a large corporation. But not all PR is practiced by big business.

Civil rights leader The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had a brilliant understanding of public relations during the campaign to desegregate Birmingham, Alabama in 1963.

The goal of the campaign was to have non-violent demonstrations and resistance to force segregated businesses to open up to African Americans. What King, and the members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, wanted to do was stage a highly visible demonstration that would not only force change in Birmingham, but also grab the attention of the entire American public.

King and his colleagues picked Birmingham because it was one of he most segregated cities in America and because it had Eugene “Bull” Conner as police commissioner.

Conner was a racist who could be counted on to attack the peaceful marchers. Birmingham was a city where black protestors were thrown in jail, and the racists were bombing homes and churches. There was a black neighborhood that had so many bombings it came to be known as Dynamite Hill.

Dr. King and his colleagues had planned demonstrations and boycotts in Birmingham, but held off with them in order to let the political system and negotiations work. But time passed, and nothing changed. Signs were still up at the lunch counters and water fountains, and protestors were still headed to jail.

King and the rest of the SCLC needed to get attention for the plight of African Americans in cities like Birmingham.

They needed to do more than fight back against the racism of segregation. They needed to get Americans of good will in all the churches and synagogues to hear their voices.

Starting in April of 1963, predominantly African American volunteers would march in the streets, hold sit-ins at segregated lunch counters, and boycott local businesses in Birmingham. As the protests started, so did the arrests.

On Good Friday, King and Abernathy joined in the marching so that they would be arrested. While King was in jail, he was given a copy of the Birmingham News, in which there was an article where white Alabama clergy urged the SCLC to stop the demonstrations and boycotts and allow the courts to solve the problem of segregation.

But King was tired of waiting, and so he wrote what would become one of the great statements of the civil rights cause. One that spoke to people who were fundamentally their friends, not their enemies. This came to be known as the “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.

Writing the letter was not easy. Dr. King wrote it in the margins of the newspaper. He wrote it on scraps of note paper. He wrote it on panels of toilet paper. (Think about what the toilet paper was like if Dr. King was able to write on it!)

The letter spoke to the moderates who were urging restraint. To them, he wrote:

“My Dear Fellow Clergymen:

While confined here in the Birmingham city jail, I came across your recent statement calling my present activities “unwise and untimely.” Seldom do I pause to answer criticism of my work and ideas…. But since I feel that you are men of genuine good will and that your criticisms are sincerely set forth, I want to try to answer your statement in what I hope will be patient and reasonable terms.”

He went on the acknowledge that perhaps he was an extremist, but that he was an extremist for love, not for hate:

“But though I was initially disappointed at being categorized as an extremist, as I continued to think about the matter I gradually gained a measure of satisfaction from the label.

Was not Jesus an extremist for love: “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.”

Was not Amos an extremist for justice: “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever flowing stream.” …

Was not Martin Luther an extremist: “Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise, so help me God.” …

And Abraham Lincoln: “This nation cannot survive half slave and half free.”

And Thomas Jefferson: “We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal . . .”

So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love?”

King’s jailhouse writings were smuggled out and published as a brochure. His eloquent words were given added force for being written in jail. As he says toward the end of his letter, it is very different to send a message from jail than from a hotel room:

“Never before have I written so long a letter. I’m afraid it is much too long to take your precious time. I can assure you that it would have been much shorter if I had been writing from a comfortable desk, but what else can one do when he is alone in a narrow jail cell, other than write long letters, think long thoughts and pray long prayers?”

Once King was released from jail eight days later, he and his followers raised the stakes. No longer would adults be marching and being arrested, children would become the vanguard. And as the children marched, photographers and reporters from around the world would document these young people being attacked by dogs, battered by water from fire hoses, and filling up the Birmingham jails.

King faced criticism for allowing the young people to face the dangers of marching in Birmingham. But he responded by criticizing the white press, asking the reporters where they had been “during the centuries when our segregated social system had been misusing and abusing Negro children.”

Although there was rioting in Birmingham, and King’s brother’s house was bombed, the campaign was ultimately successful. Business owners took down the signs that said “WHITE” and “COLORED” from the drinking fountains and bathrooms, and anyone was allowed to eat at the lunch counters. The successful protest in Birmingham set the stage for the March on Washington that would take place in August of 1963, where King would give his famous “I have a dream” speech.

We are now more than sixtyy years from King’s letter from Birmingham Jail. This letter was not one of his “feel good” speeches. It doesn’t raise the spirit the way his “I have a dream” speech did.

But it did give us a message that still matters more than ever today:

 “I hope this letter finds you strong in the faith. I also hope that circumstances will soon make it possible for me to meet each of you, not as an integrationist or a civil-rights leader but as a fellow clergyman and a Christian brother. Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear drenched communities, and in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty.”

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Ralph’s Top 10 Favorite Movies Seen in 2023

Here are my 10 favorite movies I saw for the first time in 2023. This is in no way a 10-best list, particularly since half of them came out before, sometimes long before, this year. They are just the 10 movies I enjoyed the most that I hadn’t seen before. They date from the 1920s up until December of this year.

What movies would you put on your list of favorites?


  • Torchy Blane - Smart Blonde posterTorchy Blane series (1937 – 1939), starting with Smart Blonde, Fly Away Baby, Torchy Blane The Adventurous Blonde, Blondes At Work. A series of second features from the late 1930s staring Glenda Farrell as the brassy fictional newspaper reporter Torchy Blane, who would go on the be the inspiration for Lois Lane in the Superman comics. To be fair, Torchy was also played by Lola Lane and Jane Wyman in two films, but we don’t talk about those, and they don’t count.
  • poster for movie Till.Till (2022) – Was fortunate enough to see this devastating historical civil rights drama at our wonderful community-run World Theatre. It seems inexcusable to me that Danielle Deadwyler did not get an Oscar nomination for playing Mamie Till-Mobley, the mother of the murdered teen Emmett Till.
  • The Fabelmans (2022) – Steven Spielberg’s semi-autobiographical film about growing up and making movies. It’s a great story of about the love of family and love of the movies.
  • Buster Keaton Shorts with live piano (1920s) – The World Theatre here in Kearney showed three Buster Keaton short films with live piano accompaniment by Rodney Sauer. Keaton was a writer/director/actor who established what you could do with visual comedy in the movies. If you have watched and loved the work of the Looney Tunes, Pee Wee Herman, or Mel Brooks, you have seen the brilliant comic influence of Buster Keaton.

  • Oppenheimer (2023) – Christopher Nolan’s epic biopic of J. Robert Oppenheimer reminded us all of why we go to the biggest, best theater to see bigger-than-life movies. Oppenheimer was shot on IMAX-format film and used all practical/non-digital effects. I went with a friend to see it at an UltraScreen DLX premium theater that is the next best thing to IMAX.
  • Images of Oppenheimer and Barbie moviesBarbie (2023) – Greta Gerwig’s Barbie famously was released the same weekend as the summer’s other massively anticipated film, Oppenheimer, something that studios have typically avoided. But the two films, dubbed Barbenheimer, showed that audiences were desperate for well-made, interesting, original films and wanted to see them in theaters. Superhero/franchise fatigue be damned, people wanted to get to movies and escape for an evening of magic. Gerwig keeps proving that she can take anything from indie fare like Ladybird to classics like Little Women to gonzo-crazy pop culture feminism and turn them into fascinating, entertaining and popular movies.
  • Asteroid City (2023) – Wes Anderson being maximum Wes Anderson. I can’t explain this film. Just see it if you haven’t. (Currently streaming on Amazon Prime)

  • Pride & Prejudice (1940) – The last of the old films on my 2023 list. This 1940 version of Jane Austen’s classic novel stars Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier. Dear Wife and I are used to thinking of Sir Laurence as the grand old man of British theater and cinema, not this vital, dare I say sexy, young actor. And Greer Garson is always wonderful.

  • Godzilla Minus One movie posterGodzilla Minus One (2023) – This Japanese-language film (one of three I saw this year) was a surprise for me. I had barely known it existed before going to see it at a local commercial theater. As I wrote in an earlier blog post, Godzilla Minus One is an excellent look at the price we pay for war, for fighting, for fear… and what we must do to redeem ourselves. The movie tells the story of a Japanese pilot and the men, women and children who surround him in the waning days of World War II and the years following. Yes, it is a good monster movie, but it is also a touching story of our humanity. It also shows that brave filmmakers with good stories to tell can still make great movies out of franchises that have been around for decades.

I presented my ten favorite movies in the order I watched them without any attempt to rank them. The following are the remaining 11 films that didn’t make my 10 favorites but were in contention.

  • Triangle of Sadness (2022) – Oscar nominated very-dark comedy about class conflict.
  • Avatar – The Way of Water: 3D (2022)  – Return to the world of James Cameron’s hubris, but in an entertaining way.
  • Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023) – Surprisingly fun movie based on the  role-playing game.
  • Suzume (2022) – A Japanese-language anime fantasy film I was lucky enough to see at my community non-profit theater.
  • Navalny (2022) – Disturbing documentary about the Russian dissident Alexei Navalny.
  • Spider Man – Across the SpiderVerse (2023) – Second of the ground-breaking animated SpiderVerse movies.
  • The Hustler (1961) – In which Paul Newman shows why he was one of the greatest actors of his generation. Martin Scorsese made the sequel The Color of Money in 1986.
  • Theater Camp (2023) – A low budget film made by a group of friends who just wanted to have fun together.
  • Teen-Aged Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (2023) – The fourth animated film I’ve mentioned here. Not at all like the first SpiderVerse or Mitchells vs. the Machines, but clearly influenced by the them in breaking into new ways of telling stories with animation.
  • Cold Mountain (2003) – Our campus film club showed this at our community theater, and I am so grateful to have seen this Civil War-based retelling of The Odyssey on the big screen.
  • King Coal (2023) – An thoughtful documentary/meditation on how the coal industry has changed Appalachia, including my former home of West Virginia. Directed by a grad of West Virginia University’s journalism program.

So – What were your favorite movies you saw in 2023?

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