Disney’s enormous TV and film production schedule often makes me wonder who its intended audience is. For decades, the answer would have been “children” or “families.” But Disney’s purchase of 21st Century Fox and its decision to take the Marvel and Star Wars franchises in darker directions means it is now making quite a lot that seems more geared for adults, including, most obviously, the R-rated Deadpool franchise.
When the celebrated country musician Hank Williams died on New Year’s Day in 1953 in a car on his way to a performance in Canton, Ohio, he had been traveling from Charleston, West Virginia, on U.S. Route 19, one of a series of north-south arteries that had conveyed millions of struggling Southern white people from Appalachia to new lives in the industrial Upper Midwest. This “Hillbilly Highway,” as historian Max Fraser calls it, was a dense network of interstate roads that couriered the job-seekers northward. It played a pivotal role in facilitating one of the most consequential migrations in American history.
“Even when we were kids, the term ‘child actor’ was shorthand for ‘future f---ed up adult,’” wrote actor Clint Howard, the rare child star to become a fully functioning adult, in his memoir The Boys, written with his brother, the equally productive director Ron. “Then as now, Hollywood is littered with cautionary tales.” The Howard siblings notwithstanding, a cursory glance at the history of show business reveals countless performers who charmed audiences as youths, fell into irrelevance as young adults, and drifted into disrepute, scandal, or otherwise sad outcomes.
The arts world was scandalized this past spring when the Washington National Opera announced that the sponsor of the production that would be opening its 2023-24 season was the General Dynamics Corporation, one of the world’s leading arms manufacturers. Things got all the hotter for the WNO when the schedule for the season showed it would feature the world premiere of Jeanine Tesori’s Grounded, an opera based on a play about a fighter pilot-turned-drone operator. The people who appropriate taxpayer money to buy Reaper drones had apparently given this corporation so much business that some of its leftover profits had been donated to the local Washington opera company to entertain them with a propaganda piece about the benefits of Reaper drones. Or so it was assumed.
As communist China escalates its campaign to turn the South China Sea into its own private swimming pool, the United States must organize stronger international action to stop it.
A majority of Americans said artificial intelligence (AI) will increase the spread of misinformation during the 2024 presidential election, according to a poll released Friday. The concerns shared by surveyed Americans in the AP-NORC and University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy poll follows the rapid rise of generative AI tools over the...