The Emmys are Hollywood’s top honors in television, and the night belonged to Phoebe Waller-Bridge, the star and creator of Amazon Studios’ “Fleabag” who also created “Killing Eve.” Waller-Bridge took the trophy for best comedy actress, beating out six-time “Veep” actress winner Julia Louis-Dreyfus as well as last year’s Emmy champ Rachel Brosnahan for “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.” Waller-Bridge also won an Emmy for comedy writing.
"I wanted more control over not just the creative writing, but also the marketing strategy, cover art, and other business aspects of publishing. I grew frustrated being unable to make these decisions going the traditional publishing route," she says. "I'm both a writer and entrepreneur, and I'm enjoying more creative and financial rewards than I ever have." For Michaels, who says the initial idea of going indie was "taking a leap off a cliff and hoping you can fly before you crash," the resulting benefits have exceeded her expectations.
Evolving movie-watching habits have brought new buyers in recent years, with Netflix and Amazon.com Inc leading the march of digital outlets to Sundance. The streaming services had started to outbid Weinstein Co for standout films. Filmmakers prospered as Amazon paid $12 million for “The Big Sick” and Netflix paid $12.5 million for “Mudbound” in 2017. This year, it was unclear whether those outlets will replace Weinstein as the pacesetters.
Media platforms like Netflix, Hulu, and even Amazon have all released successful series this past season. They have lured big-time writers and directors like Weed's Jenji Kohan and “Fight Club’s” David Fincher. TV is now drawing big-time players like Matthew McCaughey (True Detective), Martin Scorsese (Boardwalk Empire), and John Goodman (Alpha House) to the small screen, which was unthinkable 10 years ago.Yet this “Golden Age” in TV also means fierce competition. With the rise in popularity of digital platforms like Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu, the television landscape has been severely altered.
The number of African-American-owned bookstores has dropped significantly since the late 1970s and 1980s due to a variety of factors, including corporate control of the Internet, waning literacy and fiscal mismanagement. In the 1970s and 1980s, more than 1,000 black-owned bookstores were in business in the United States. Now only slightly more than 100, possibly 116 to 117, if that many, remain open.
The drive to destroy the private sphere of consciousness inextricably links Moore's law and Singularity with advances in surveillance, data mining and the systematic destruction of personal privacy. Singularity and privacy will not coexist, although the technology that propels us toward the Singularity needs privacy and its destruction to study human intelligence more acutely. As private consciousness becomes more available for examination and translation, Singularity becomes more realistic.
In a thriving Bay Area technology sector where black and brown faces are the exception and not the norm, Chris Cruz, a Filipino American, and Isaac Reed, an African American, are crashing the party. A study conducted in 2011 by three California-based groups looked at workforce diversity at a dozen companies in Silicon Valley, including industry giants Intel, Cisco and Ebay, and found an industry where African Americans and Latinos are grossly underrepresented when compared to their percentages of the state population.
At Dawson’s federal trial that summer in 1967, Dawson’s wife greeted every person at the courthouse doors like it was a party and she was the hostess. One of the feds’ witnesses, a housing developer, testified that he gave Dawson $1,750 in cash. Shortly afterward, the city installed water and sewer facilities at one of his developments. Dawson actually testified under oath that his word was the law in Cohoes but denied taking any kickbacks.
It shouldn’t be surprising that a movie by Spike Lee explores themes of race and racism in a thought-provoking way. Da 5 Bloods opens with war footage and speakers remarking on the historical use of Black soldiers as frontline infantry. The entire plotline about the buried gold is centered around the idea of taking the gold as a way to “stick it to the man” and support their people. Several characters remark about the injustice of Black people not having the same rights as others despite spilling their blood on the battlefield in large numbers through various wars.
