Portside

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What Are America's 10 `Most Hated' Brands? And Why?

By Patrick Coffee

January 15, 2013
Media Bistro

Today we came across a list of "America's 10 Most Hated Companies" courtesy of Ragan's PR Daily and 24/7 Wall Street, which compiled the worst of the worst based on "stock performance, employee and customer satisfaction, and management decisions."

We were intrigued, so we figured we'd peruse the list and see what we could make of it. What are these brands, and what did they do to offend the American public (and their investors) so badly?

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Sundance 2013: Are Filmmakers Vain or Nostalgic? The Digital Distribution Dilemma

By Lucas Shaw

January 21, 2013
The Wrap

Are filmmakers vain for wanting theatrical distribution? At a Wrap panel at the Sundance FIlm Festival on Monday, filmmaker Lynn Shelton and other indie veterans crossed swords with digital distribution executives in a debate about the future of independent film and how it can find profitability.

"I'm a sucker for the theatrical experience," said Shelton, whose "Touchy Feely" premiered in competition on Saturday. "I understand less and less people are watching films in theaters, but all the films I've made have been for a theatrical release. I'm thinking of them being on the big screen."

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Science journalism's great divide

By Curtis Brainard

January 21, 2013
Columbia Journalism Review (CJR)

Science journalists in the West have a bleaker outlook on the future of their profession than their colleagues in the Global South, according to a survey of the field released this month.

"If there is a sense of crisis in science journalism, this is mainly perceived in USA, Canada and Europe, but less so in Latin American, Asia, and North and Southern Africa," says the report from researchers at the London School of Economics, , Museu da Vida (a science museum in Fiocruz, Brazil), and SciDev.net (a news website that covers science in the developing word), which queried 953 reporters and editors.

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What Would Karl and Rosa Say?

by Victor Grossman

January 16, 2013
MR Zine - Monthly Review

Sunday was the day when those of left-wing persuasion mark the memory of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, brutally murdered by the Nazis' predecessors in January 1919.  Thousands go every year to the memorial site where they were once buried, often placing red carnations around the large, simple stone saying: "The dead warn us!"  Around them, in a semicircular wall, are urns of leading socialists and communists from the early 1900s until 1990.

Every year a group of several thousand mostly younger people, with flags, banners, and music, walk two and a half miles from Karl Marx Allee.  On arriving they join the far bigger main crowd who go by subway or other transportation and walk the last seven or eight blocks to the memorial site at the edge of a larger cemetery holding the graves of many progressives.

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How the NRA Became an Organization for Aspiring Vigilantes

By Rick Perlstein

January 10, 2013
The Nation.com Blogs

Yes, the man who signed the Mulford Act in 1967 outlawing the carrying of weapons in public, back when the target was Black Panthers, was also an early adopter of, and crucial propagandist for, the theory that armed citizens should imagine themselves taking on the state -  once the likes of the Black Panthers were defunct. As he put it in the third part of his radio series that June, what the authors of the Second Amendment "really feared was that government might take away the freedoms of the citizens in their newly created free state. Each of those first ten amendments guarantees a freedom. the Second Amendment guarantees the right of the citizen to protect those other freedoms. Take away the arms of the citizen, and where is his defense against not only criminals but also the possible despotism of his government? In police states they take away the citizens' arms first. This ensures the perpetuation of the state's power, and the ability of police to deal with dissenters, as well as criminals."

"So isn't it better for the people to own arms than to risk enslavement by power-hungry men or nations? The founding fathers thought so. This is Ronald Reagan. Thanks for listening."

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Why Old Men Find Young Women's Voices So Annoying

By Amanda Hess

January 7, 2013
Slate.com

Last week, Slate Lexicon Valley podcaster (and NPR On the Media host) Bob Garfield lamented a frightening tic invading American speech. It appears "almost exclusively among women, and young women at that." As these women form sentences, Garfield explains, "something happens to their voice, as if they have a catch in their throat." He summons his 11-year-old daughter Ida to the microphone to mimic the speech pattern. "Ida," he instructs her, "be obnoxious."

The affect of which Garfield speaks is known as "creaky voice" or "vocal fry," a gravelly lowering of the voice that conjures the sounds of "a door creaking or a hinge that needs oiling." Over the course of the 26-minute podcast, Garfield describes the speech pattern as "vulgar," "repulsive," "mindless," "annoying," and "really annoying." "I want the oil to stop frying," Garfield says. "I want someone to wave a magic wand over a significant portion of the American public" -  you know, women -  "and have the frying come to an end."

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What Downton Abbey Can Tell Us about Class in America Today

By Kathy M. Newman

January 22, 2013
Working Class Studies

In season two of Downton Abbey, the inimical Dame Maggie Smith (who plays the "Dowager Countess") finds out that one of the family's servants will be allowed to live out his final days (after suffering an incurable war wound) in the family's lavish second floor quarters. The Countess is displeased by this and opines that "It always happens when you give these little people power, it goes to their heads like strong drink."

I am a fan of the show, transfixed by the class differences represented in the series which tries very hard -  from the dialogue, the sumptuous costumes, and the setting -  to be about another time and place. But is it? Let's look at a few of the myths that swirl around Downton Abbey and consider what we can learn about the real history behind the show -   and about ourselves.

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Music Exhibit Recalls Another Time For Jews and Blacks

By Seth Berkman

January 18, 2013
Forward

Just south of the bustle of Harlem's famed 125th Street corridor, a mix of brownstones and churches in Harlem's Mount Morris Park neighborhood prospers today as home to a large working-class black population. But walk down these streets with John T. Reddick, and he will show you the remnants, still-visible, of the vibrant Jewish life of the early 20th century, which forged a rich era of musical collaboration between blacks and Jews.

"People think it was Jewish and became black, but it was a shared community," said Reddick, an African-American architect and historian who has lived in Harlem since 1980.

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