There are many different kinds of literacy, more than just being able to read words and understand them. Media literacy is the ability to understand and distinguish what is being communicated through various means of mass communication – TV, news, Internet, and more. This is critically important as our society and becoming more and more saturated on propaganda or entertainment by contains questionable content. Finland began teaching media literacy at age 3 as Russian propaganda is a pervasive issue in their society.
Category: Pop Culture
Popular culture, culture that seems to spread beyond more than three people
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Medical Aide in Dying
In 2016, voters passed the End of Life Options Act, which makes it legal for terminally ill adult Coloradans to obtain and self-administer a fatal dose of prescribed medication. Roughly 1,100 people have used MAID in the state, and recent legislation increased access for the sickest patients.
Robert Sanchez humanizes how those with terminal illnesses are empowered to die with dignity.
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An airplane meet cute
If you have ever flown solo on an airplane, you know how much of a gamble it is who your seats will be for the duration of your flight. Most of the time, it’s a non-event. You sit there. They sit there. Maybe you share basic pleasantries or small talk. Every now and then, you luck out into somebody who was willing to have a conversation. And for some lucky people, you might meet the love of your life.
Anesu grabbed his backpack and walked down the plane. He prepared himself to apologize to the fellow passenger who’d previously won the seat lottery — a whole row to herself — who was now set to share the space with his long legs. He hoped it wouldn’t be awkward. He just wanted to switch off and focus on getting home.
“But as soon as I sat down, she was very nice to me. She had a big smile. I think she made a joke: ‘Welcome to Paradise.’ Something like that… That was almost the opposite reaction I was imagining or expecting in my head, if I was expecting anything at all,” recalls Anesu.
“I just remember from that moment onward, it was an unexpected kindness. Someone being really nice to me at a moment that I really needed it. And we just started speaking.”
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Pilot makes a smiley face
(warning, a couple f-bombs) a couple guys captured in pilot making a smile, smiley face in the air above them.
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Alexandra Petri attempts to be the government
What happens when you send a humorist to do investigative reporting? You get a story about how absolutely insane it is when the government won’t do his job. Alexandra Petri set out to perform tasks usually allocated to a government agency employee.
What became a five-month quest to assume government responsibilities took me from the overgrown fields of Antietam to the cramped basket of a hot-air balloon about 1,400 feet over Ohio; from a biology lab at Johns Hopkins University, where I beheaded flies, to a farmstead in Maryland, where I inspected the fly-bothered udder of a cow named Melissa.
And the potential duties kept piling up as I learned about each round of cuts. Since I started typing this paragraph, Donald Trump has fired many of the people who surveil infectious diseases; before I finish typing this paragraph, he may have hired them back. I hope so! I would do almost anything for a good story, but perhaps I should draw the line at “monitor Ebola.”
Amanda MullJohn F. Kennedy famously implored us: “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” Well, I asked! And the answer is: lots of things. If you don’t mind doing them wrong.
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Dragonsweeper
Here’s a fun Minesweeper clone that combines dungeon-crawling elements with a Minesweeper-like grid, called Dragonsweeper. The numbers indicate the hit points of the monsters in those squares. You need to collect gold in order to level up and earn more hearts to take on larger monsters.
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The Cassandras predicted our current political reality
Back in 2015, 2016, there was a minority group of people who saw what Trump really was, Modern-day Cassandras who had a vision but were not listened to.
Why were they afraid of this? Or, put better, how did they correctly see all this coming? Virtually all the Cassandras would make the same points. They used different examples and discussed them in different ways, but the bones of the argument were the same. The experience for me, as interviewer, was like hearing the same song played by different musicians—once by a folk guitarist, then sung by an opera singer, then played by a heavy metal band, then a string quartet, and so on. Very different styles, but clearly working from the same sheet music.
I started to think of this as “The Cassandra Song.” It plays as follows:
- Trump (or senior people in the movement) said (insert bad outcome or values).
- We had good reasons to think he/they meant it.
- We had good reasons to think his base wanted it.
I still remember how the arguments with family members were that this was not going to go well. While they may not concede that I was right, they can definitely see that a lot of things did come true.
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Rolling back the Constitution
It’s no surprise that, with recent Supreme Court rulings using questionable logic and some dramatic mental gymnastics, the entire goal is to roll the country back to an older era.
What this means in practice is that if you are not white, you cannot go certain places without the risk of being kidnapped by federal agents. That is not “common sense”; it is the nullification of the Constitution’s guarantee of equal rights under the law.
This decision is only one of the ways that the Court, under Chief Justice John Roberts, has been chipping away at the parts of the Constitution dedicated to ensuring equal citizenship to all through rulings on voting rights, immigration, and equal protection. It has done this even as it insists—while striking down affirmative action and school-integration programs—that the Constitution is “colorblind.”
The Constitution of the Roberts Court is not color-blind. It is a Constitution that permits discrimination on the basis of race, but forbids alleviating discrimination on the basis of race. And over the next year, the Court will face more cases that could further erode both the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, pushing America back toward what some on the right believe is the true, Antebellum Constitution.
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SNL’s alternate Home Alone ending
Ariana Grande and the SNL cast provide an alternate Home Alone ending.