Internet

Dec. 12, 2017: FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel will be voting on the future of net neutrality this week. She discusses what’s at stake, and how it will impact the lives of all Americans. Plus, the Republican strategy with minority voters; remembering the life and legacy of San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee; the future of democracy in Zimbabwe; dissecting the link between healthcare and employment; and why language matters so much when we talk about addiction. 

February 21, 2017:

1. Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster Tapped For National Security Adviser (7 min)

2. Iraqi Forces Lead Offensive to Retake Western Mosul (5 min)

3. Reps Feel Public Outrage at Town Hall Meetings (6 min)

4. Black Artist Tries to Bridge Racial Divides With KKK Members (8 min)

5. SCOTUS to Decide: Can a Facebook Post Be Illegal? (7 min)

6. Citizens Take a Stand in Broadband Access Debate (4 min)

7. SCOTUS to Decide: Can a Facebook Post Be Illegal? (7 min)

Heads up, Silicon Valley, Bangalore’s not just for outsourcing anymore. It’s rising fast as a world-class hub of tech and biotech innovation, pulling successful Indian entrepreneurs back from Silicon Valley, and from around India. It’s part of the story of how the other Asian giant, India, with half its population under age 25, is just getting going in seeing what it can do in this century.

For his final episode, Sean Rameswaram traces the path of creative work he has personally posted, from blogging to sketch comedy videos to a truly ill rap posse. To close out the show, he gets the posse back together for one last song.

Special thanks to Jay Cowit for this. 

There’s much we don’t know about what the 21st Century will bring. But we’re not just flying blind. We know that certain things matter more now than they used, and others matter less. One thing that matters a lot is the Internet. It has transformed how we learn and how we connect, and how we come together. In China, there are now more than 600 million Internet users — about twice the population of the entire United States. With the advent of Chinese social media, starting about a decade ago, they began to connect more, speak out more, challenge the government more. The government has responded by clamping down, especially since Xi Jinping came to power almost three years ago. If a big country like China, with big aspirations, places significant limits on how its people can use the Internet, does that also limit its potential to be a 21st century power? Seems a good question to be asking, as Chinese president and Party Chief Xi Jinping arrives for a state visit, and speech at the United Nations.

September 16, 2015: 1. California Burning: One Family’s Terrifying Escape | 2. Hungary Cracks Down on Refugees and Migrants | 3. How a Dancing Baby Video Could Change Copyright Laws | 4. 17 Democrats Ran for President in 1976. Can Today’s GOP Learn Anything from What Happened?

It’s hard to determine whether we care about lyrics more thanks to the internet, but we’re figuring out new ways to show how much we care online. Sean Rameswaram talks lyric videos with The Atlantic’s Kevin O’Keeffe and lyric annotation with Genius’s Sasha Frere-Jones.

Kung Fury is every 80s action film you’ve ever watched and dreamed of, packed into a ridiculous, rollicking, fully retro 30 minutes. It’s about a renegade cop in 1985 Miami who gets hacked back in time to kill Hitler, of course. But really it’s about reveling in synth-pop, mullets, awesome jackets, and all things silly about cinema. David Sandberg, a 29-year-old Swedish filmmaker, wanted to make something that would live up to a child’s wildest dreams of what a movie should be. “When you look at movie posters from the 80s, it’s like, ‘Wow!'” he says. “I wanted to make Kung Fury like jumping into that poster and delivering what the poster promises.” 
Sandberg came up with Kung Fury while making commercials and music videos in Stockholm. “I had a piece of paper and I wrote down a bunch of cool words,” he says. “Inferno, justice, cop force, and then I had ‘Kung Fu’ and somewhere on there I had ‘fury’ and it just clicked: ‘Kung Fury!'” Sandberg quit his job, moved back to his mom’s, played around with a green screen on his own dime, and then, in December of 2013, put a trailer on Kickstarter. The internet responded exactly as he had hoped and he raised over $600,000 in under a month. 

Kung Fury will probably end up in the history books — not because it’s particularly good (though millions of YouTube viewers would argue it is), but on account of it going from popular joke trailer, to blockbuster Kickstarter campaign, to an eventual debut at the Cannes Film Festival — yes, that Cannes. Sandberg found out about beachside screenings outside the annual Festival and applied earlier this year. He didn’t think much would come of it, but was accepted. “When we had the screening I was super nervous because there were some films before Kung Fury that were super serious,” Sandberg says of the film’s premiere at this year’s festival. “I thought that people would hate Kung Fury for poking fun at the art of film or something. But people loved it.” 
Next, Sandberg is working on a full-length version of the film. But he might not have to depend on the internet this time around. After Cannes, he met with Hollywood producers who offered to finance a longer version of his kung fu comedy. He also befriended David Hasselhoff, who offered to help in any way possible:  

WATCH THE FULL VERSION OF KUNG FURY: 

July 22, 2015: 1. How Immigration Enforcement Is Changing | 2. Defending The $3 Billion Bail Business | 3. The Highway Trust Fund is Running Out of Money | 4. The Digital Wild West: Time to Close the Internet Frontier?

June 23, 2015: 1. White Supremacy: A Long History in American Politics | 2. A Community for Hate: How White Power Groups Thrive Online | 3. Lessons From a Harvard-MIT Online Learning Experiment | 4. Taylor Swift Is Not the Hero of The Music Industry | 5. First Same-Sex Couple Ever to Apply for Marriage License Share Their Story