[T]he folks at Joybird decided to dive in a little bit deeper to see which TV characters could actually afford their lifestyles, and they determined that of the 30 characters analyzed, 60 percent could not afford their digs. Let's just say things are a bit more affordable in Hawkins, Indiana than on the Upper East Side.Here are a few of their results:
library(geniusR) high_as_hope <- genius_album(artist = "Florence the Machine", album = "High as Hope")
library(tidyverse)
library(tidytext) tidy_hope <- high_as_hope %>% unnest_tokens(word,lyric) %>% anti_join(stop_words)
head(tidy_hope)
## # A tibble: 6 x 4 ## track_title track_n line word ## <chr> <int> <int> <chr> ## 1 June 1 1 started ## 2 June 1 1 crack ## 3 June 1 2 woke ## 4 June 1 2 chicago ## 5 June 1 2 sky ## 6 June 1 2 black
song_words <- tidy_hope %>% count(track_title, word, sort = TRUE) %>% ungroup()
song_words <- song_words %>% bind_tf_idf(word, track_title, n) %>% arrange(desc(tf_idf)) head(song_words)
## # A tibble: 6 x 6 ## track_title word n tf idf tf_idf ## <chr> <chr> <int> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> ## 1 Hunger hunger 25 0.236 2.30 0.543 ## 2 Grace grace 16 0.216 2.30 0.498 ## 3 The End of Love wash 18 0.209 2.30 0.482 ## 4 Hunger ooh 20 0.189 2.30 0.434 ## 5 Patricia wonderful 10 0.125 2.30 0.288 ## 6 100 Years hundred 12 0.106 2.30 0.245
song_words %>% mutate(word = factor(word, levels = rev(unique(word)))) %>% group_by(track_title) %>% top_n(5) %>% ungroup() %>% ggplot(aes(word, tf_idf, fill = track_title)) + geom_col(show.legend = FALSE) + labs(x = NULL, y = "tf-idf") + facet_wrap(~track_title, ncol = 2, scales = "free") + coord_flip()
There is loneliness in this record, and there's issues, and pain, and things that I struggled with, but the overriding feeling is that I have hope about them, and that's what kinda brought me to this title; I was gonna call it The End of Love, which I actually saw as a positive thing cause it was the end of a needy kind of love, it was the end of a love that comes from a place of lack, it's about a love that's bigger and broader, that takes so much explaining. It could sound a bit negative but I didn't really think of it that way.
Researchers Jonah Berger of the University of Pennsylvania and Grant Packard of Wilfrid Laurier University were interested in understanding the relationship between similarity and success. In a recent study published in Psychological Science, the authors describe how a person’s drive for stimulation can be satisfied by novelty. Cultural items that are atypical, therefore, may be more liked and become more popular.The study, which is was published online ahead of print, used a method of topic modeling called latent Dirichlet allocation. (Side note, this analysis is available in the R topicmodels package, as function LDA. It requires a document term matrix, which can be created in R. Perhaps a future post!) The LDA extracted 10 topics from the lyrics of songs spanning seven genres (Christian, country, dance, pop, rap, rock, and rhythm and blues):
“Although some researchers have argued that cultural success is impossible to predict,” they explain, “textual analysis of thousands of songs suggests that those whose lyrics are more differentiated from their genres are more popular.”
That's right - reporter Lucy Jayne Ford wrote a dissertation on Legally Blonde and was able to give star Reese Witherspoon a copy of it:The moment I handed @RWitherspoon my 15,000 dissertation/love letter to Legally Blonde - and yes, it was scented. I blacked out somewhere between her taking it and Oprah saying 'wow' #WrinkleInTime pic.twitter.com/56XV8FElqV— Lucy Jayne F🌸rd (@lucyj_ford) March 13, 2018
Lucy Jayne Ford, a reporter for Bauer Media in London, was at a press junket to interview Witherspoon and her Wrinkle in Time co-stars Oprah Winfrey and Mindy Kaling, but couldn’t resist the opportunity to show her admiration for Witherspoon.
“I want to start by saying I’m obviously a gigantic fan of all of you; Reese, I actually wrote 15,000 words on you once,” Ford said before handing Reese a copy of her lengthy dissertation and explaining that she had watched the film 800 times to write it.
While Ford conducted her interview after giving Witherspoon the dissertation, Witherspoon made sure to ask her one burning question that Elle Woods most definitely would have approved of before their time ended.
“I have just one question,” Witherspoon said. “Is it scented?”
“I actually put perfume on it before this,” Ford confided.
[S]exual harassment and sexual assault are very different things. Even with Harvey Weinstein’s reported abuses, most of the accounts describe uncomfortable advances that women were mostly able to reject.I'll admit, when I first saw the "me too" stories, I was initially frustrated for many of the same reasons Buss highlights. Not because I was disappointed that all these women hadn't experienced an assault - this is something I would never wish on anyone, even my worst enemy - but because I worried that wouldn't understand why my experience of a lewd comment or tasteless joke was so different. Why a street harasser might be an annoying inconvenience for some, but an event that triggers symptoms of years of undiagnosed PTSD for others.
Conflating harassment and assault insults those who have actually been sexually assaulted. It cheapens the trauma they’ve endured.
But I was a victim of repeated sexual assault as a 4-year-old. I’m someone who should feel empowered by the recent wave of attention. Instead, it feels empty.
Harassment involves words and innuendo. It’s uncomfortable and unfair, and can certainly affect career mobility — as Hollywood’s leading women have now decided to emphasize. But it can be rebutted. It typically doesn’t involve violence or physical force. It takes place on street corners, in offices, bars, movie studios and pretty much anywhere people interact.
Assault, on the other hand, is one of the most brutal experiences a person can endure — at any age and in any situation.
The theme that women’s feelings aren’t really to be trusted by men drives (an estimated) 72.81% of the sitcoms we watch, 31.2% of the books we read, and 98.9% of the conversations men have with other men about the women in their lives. Basically, women are crazy, and we are not. Although many women seem to be very annoyed by it, it’s generally depicted as one of those cute and innocuous differences between the sexes.If we want to stop the spread of rape culture... If we want to empower survivors to come forward... If we want to weed out the abusers in schools, and churches, and scout troops... We need to believe people's experiences are valid. We need to trust that their feelings are not overreactions.
And perhaps it would be, if it were limited to feelings about the dishes or taking out the garbage. But, this distrust can be pervasive, spreading to a general skepticism about the truthfulness of their own accounts of their own experiences. If women’s feelings aren’t really to be trusted, then naturally their recollections of certain things that have happened to them aren’t really to be trusted either.
This is part of the reason why it took an entire high school football team full of women for some of us to finally just consider that Bill Cosby might not be Cliff Huxtable. It’s how, despite hearing complaints about it from girlfriends, homegirls, cousins, wives, and classmates, so many of us refused to believe how serious street harassment can be until we saw it with our own eyes. It’s why we needed to see actual video evidence before believing the things women had been saying for years about R. Kelly.
I was curious how far readers typically make it through these books. I couldn’t get any reading data, but I reached out to Audiobooks.com for listening data on political memoirs by presidential candidates going back to the 2000 election. We focused on books by every “serious” candidate published before or shortly after each presidential election — “serious” as defined by my colleague Harry Enten back before the 2016 election. (Basically, any candidate who held a major political office before running or got at least a bit of the vote in Iowa or New Hampshire.) Audiobooks.com was able to find the books with more than 10 downloads and sent over the average percentage of the book that listeners sat through.The book with the highest proportion listened to was John McCains's Faith of My Fathers, for which the average completion rate was 74.7%. But part of that high completion rate was the total length of the book: this audiobook could be completed in 4.8 hours, and the average user listened to 3.6 hours. The book with the longest time listened to was George W. Bush's Decision Points, which had a 59.7% completion rate that corresponded to 12 (of 20.2) hours.
Before we get to the data, there are some caveats! If you don’t see a book on here, remember that not all books have an audio version widely available. Moreover, sales for some of these books peaked long before Audiobooks.com began collecting data. Second, if a completion rate number seems low, keep in mind that most people don’t finish reading most things. Most likely, less than half of the people who started this article made it to this sentence. It’s the nature of the game.
Hell of a day for the President to forget how to tweet. pic.twitter.com/ABffmwwH8D— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) August 12, 2017
We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence, on many sides. On many sides. It's been going on for a long time in our country. Not Donald Trump, not Barack Obama. This has been going on for a long, long time.As Julia Azari of FiveThirtyEight points out, though Presidential responses to racial violence have always been rather weak, Trump's are even weaker.
President Trump lashed out Thursday at the appearance and intellect of Mika Brzezinski, a co-host of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” drawing condemnation from his fellow Republicans and reigniting the controversy over his attitudes toward women that nearly derailed his candidacy last year.When asked during the White House press briefing, Sarah Huckabee Sanders actually defended the President's action, and turned it around as an attack on the media:
Mr. Trump’s invective threatened to further erode his support from Republican women and independents, both among voters and on Capitol Hill, where he needs negotiating leverage for the stalled Senate health care bill.
The president described Ms. Brzezinski as “low I.Q. Crazy Mika” and claimed in a series of Twitter posts that she had been “bleeding badly from a face-lift” during a social gathering at Mr. Trump’s resort in Florida around New Year’s Eve. The White House did not explain what had prompted the outburst, but a spokeswoman said Ms. Brzezinski deserved a rebuke because of her show’s harsh stance on Mr. Trump.
The tweets ended five months of relative silence from the president on the volatile subject of gender, reintroducing a political vulnerability: his history of demeaning women for their age, appearance and mental capacity.
“The president has been attacked mercilessly … by that program. And I think he’s been very clear that, when attacked he’s going to hit back. The American people elected somebody who’s tough, who is smart and who is a fighter. It’s Donald Trump. And I don’t think it’s a surprise to anybody that he fights fire with fire."My favorite part was when she said the President has never encouraged violence. Yeah, we've heard that one before:
Whataboutism is a propaganda technique used by the Soviet Union in its dealings with the Western world. When Cold War criticisms were levelled at the Soviet Union, the response would be "What about..." followed by the naming of an event in the Western world. It represents a case of tu quoque (appeal to hypocrisy), a logical fallacy that attempts to discredit the opponent's position by asserting the opponent's failure to act consistently in accordance with that position, without directly refuting or disproving the opponent's initial argument.In fact the Wikipedia article linked and quoted above contains an entire section on Trump's use of whataboutism. Now, to be fair, regular people use this tactic as well - this isn't purely a propaganda statement. But it is troubling when an administration uses it to deflect criticism without responding to it or making any changes because of it. I've already commented on some of the dangerous directions the current administration is taking. This is another manifestation of a frightening trend.
On social media, where Fyre Festival had been sold as a selfie-taker’s paradise, accounts showed none of the aspirational A-lister excesses, with only sad sandwiches and free alcohol to placate the restless crowds. General disappointment soon turned to near-panic as the festival was canceled and attendees attempted to flee back to the mainland of Florida.
“Not one thing that was promised on the website was delivered,” said Shivi Kumar, 33, who works in technology sales in New York, and came with a handful of friends expecting the deluxe “lodge” package for which they had paid $3,500: four king size beds and a chic living room lounge. Instead Ms. Kumar and her crew were directed to a tent encampment. Some tents had beds, but some were still unfurnished. Directed by a festival employee to “grab a tent,” attendees started running, she said.
Founder and chief executive John Mackey explained that the business had changed because “the more conventional, mainstream supermarkets have upped their game. The world is very different today than it was five years ago.”Not only has Whole Foods been the butt of jokes over its prices; comedians have also noticed the declining foot traffic:
One rival chain, Sprouts Farmers Market, was found to be on average 19% cheaper than Whole Foods. Other rivals, including Kroger, picked up Whole Foods customers. Last month, Barclays advised that Whole Foods had experienced a “staggering” decline in foot traffic that it estimated at 3%, or roughly 14 million customers.
Whole Foods has long been the butt of jokes for its prices – although it disputes it is more expensive than it rivals – and its bougie products. Comedian John Oliver is particularly fond of its asparagus water.
Whole Foods on Sunday is just a refugee camp for people with too much money.— Jim Gaffigan (@JimGaffigan) January 25, 2015
"It is over for The Terminator and Arnold," the source stated. "The studio has taken the sequel off the production slate completely, meaning there is no pre-production or any plans for another sequel. The talent had been offered long-term deals, but this is not happening."
The source also stated there was a chance an independent production company could step in and pick up the project, but convincing Schwarzenegger back would be "a tough ask".
