Friday Finds, X

Will the Millenials Save Playboy? (NY Times)

In the office, members of the staff use terms like “intersectionality,” “sex positivity,” “privileging” and “lived experience” to describe their editorial vision — and tout their feminist credentials. Two editors are former employees of Ms., the magazine co-founded by Gloria Steinem.

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It all seems genuine enough. Except for the elephant in the room — which is that Playboy is still a magazine full of nude women, whose chief executive is a straight white male, with a dead man still listed at the top of the masthead as the founding editor in chief.

I'm not sure Playboy will survive in this age of extremes: strong, deserved sentiment for women's rights and equality, and the ubiquity of porn.

Wait, am I saying that Playboy is not porn anymore?


Living Near Trees, Not Just Green Space, Improves Wellbeing (CityLab)

More intriguingly, they also found that exposure to low-lying vegetation was not consistently associated with any particular health outcome. Exposure to grass was, surprisingly, associated with higher odds of psychological distress. The wellness-boosting feature, then, appears to be the trees...

Although where we currently live now, you feel like you're living in a jungle. So, you know, balance, balance.


Motion Smoothing Is Ruining Cinema (Vulture)

It works well on sports, for example, because it helps you keep better track of fast-moving balls and athletes. And sports and live events are already shot at higher frame rates, so they need less smoothing. But movies and narrative shows aren’t just about following the ball, and the creation of new frames feels off, junking up the experience with digital filler. Indeed, the new frames often inadvertently introduce their own artifacts — unwanted shadows, halos, flashes, and the like — that can make the image even more distracting.

Every time I've seen it turned on at a friend's or family member's house, I have gone into the TV settings and turned it off, no lie. It's abhorrent. But reading this makes me wonder: do people not care because they're watching sports way more than they watch anything else, and it's completely flipped for me?


I am so proud of El Paso (Medium)

I tell our story wherever I go. This place of immigrants, of people from all over the planet, who came here to do better for themselves and to do better for this country. I tell people about how we are one of the safest cities in the United States. Nearly 700,000 people and we’ve averaged only 18 murders a year.

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