What kind of person drives a Honda? Apparently any kind. A new, interactive commercial by the car company shows a double-sided story. While watching the commercial on a special YouTube landing page, you can press the “R” button on your keyboard in order to switch between story lines.
One story follows a dad picking up his children from school, the other a getaway driver. Try it yourself. The videos are perfectly parallel.
A delegation of 83 National Guard troops headed to Hawaii on Thursday to provide security for the Big Island community of Pahoa as a stream of lava from the Kilauea volcano continues to creep toward the small town.
Though the lava is traveling at less than five yards per hour and has been approaching for the last several weeks, residents fear that looters will raid evacuated houses. Residents of about 50 houses in what officials are calling “a corridor of risk” have been told to be ready to leave, according to Reuters.
The Kilauea volcano has erupted persistently since 1983 from its Pu’u O’o vent. The latest flow of lava started on June 27.
[Reuters]
A police department in the Philadelphia suburb of Conshohocken is offering its lobby and parking lot as a venue to buy and sell items from Craigslist and other online marketplaces. The location is well-lit and has 24-hour surveillance so that you can feel safe exchanging your used futon for money.
“I figured there’s got to be a better place for people who don’t know each other to complete these transactions,”Conshohocken Police officer Steve Vallone said, the AP reports. “Why not allow people to complete their online transactions from here? It seems like the perfect match.”
The offer came shortly after an alleged rapist was charged with killing a local man he met through Craigslist, according to NBC News in Philadelphia.
Similar measures have been taken in Hillsborough County in Florida, where residents can visit four of the police station’s parking lots to engage in cash transactions.
[NBC]
Could Jon Stewart do news without comedy? Reports surfaced earlier this month that NBC had approached Jon Stewart about a hosting gig at its Sunday morning political show Meet the Press following David Gregory’s exit. The comedian confirmed to Rolling Stone on Thursday that those reports were indeed true. But he didn’t take the offer all that seriously.
“My guess is they were casting as wide and as weird a net as they could,” he says. “I’m sure part of them was thinking, ‘Why don’t we just make it a variety show?'”
But Stewart wasn’t interested in the gig. “I felt like that was one of those situations where someone says, ‘We really like what you do. Why don’t you come over here and do something different, maybe something you don’t do as well, for us?'” the Daily Show host said. “I can understand notionally where it comes from. News and entertainment have melded in a way. But they would be overcompensating on the entertainment side. That’s certainly not an outlandish decision, although I don’t necessarily think that’s the best direction for it.”
Good thing too—what would Daily Show and Colbert Report fans do if both Stewart and Stephen Colbert had left Comedy Central?
Basketball great Michael Jordan has never played golf with President Barack Obama — but if he ever does, he thinks it would be a walk in the park.
“I’d take him out,” Jordan said Thursday, in a video interview with sportscaster Ahmad Rashad. “He’s a hack. It would be all day playing with him.”
When asked if he could play golf with anyone in the world, Jordan chose golfing great Arnold Palmer and the President. Though he’d likely struggle against Palmer, he had no such worries about Obama. “I never said he wasn’t a great politician,” Jordan went on to say. “I’m just saying he’s a s*** golfer.”
Those are some bold words about POTUS. But the 14-time NBA All-Star is known for his hyper-competitive streak on and off the golf course. Sports Illustrated‘s Rick Reilly once reported that after Jordan lost a game of golf to U.S. Olympic coach Chuck Daly, he got up the next morning and pounded on Daly’s hotel room door until the Dream Team coach agreed to a rematch. Jordan won.
On Tuesday, Disney’s Marvel Studios made some major announcements about the future of its superheroes on the big screen. Studio head Kevin Feige laid out the plan through 2019, and it includes some very obscure superheroes. While comic book fans everywhere are pumped, the millions of people who paid to make the Iron Man movies blockbusters probably don’t even know who Captain Marvel is, or how the big purple guy from the Guardians of the Galaxy movies relates to the Infinity Gauntlet.
So for those of us who aren’t comic book experts, here’s a breakdown of who these new superheroes are, what the Avengers’ next adventure might be, and what the next five years of summer movies will look like.
Ultron (The Avengers: Age of Ultron, May 1, 2015)
Let’s start out with the core of Marvel’s empire: the Avengers. A quick refresher on this crew: the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (which now have their own television show) led by Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) bring together the Avengers Initiative: Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), Captain America (Chris Evans), the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo). These superheroes are assisted by agents Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner). In the last movie, they saved the world from Thor’s brother Loki who used an object called the Tesseract to build a wormhole and invade earth.
So now that we’ve dispatched of the Tesseract, what’s next? The titular villain in the sequel, Ultron, is a machine originally created by Dr. Hank Pym, who was once Ant-Man (more on that in a second). Ultron became sentient and rebelled, as machines always tend to do in these sorts of situations. Ultron’s ultimate goal is total destruction of the human race, and he’s arguably the Avenger’s biggest adversary in the comics. He’ll be played by James Spader in the movie.
Ant-Man (Ant-Man, July 17, 2015)
Since we’re on the topic of Hank Pym, let’s talk Ant-Man. The premise of the film is that a con man and electronics expert named Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) receives the Ant-Man costume and technology from his mentor Hank Pym (Michael Douglas). Ant-Man is able to reduce himself to the size of an ant while gaining superhuman strength, and can will other objects to change size. He also has a cybernetic helmet that allows him to communicate with and control insects. (Useful!)
The casting of Rudd (Role Models, Knocked Up) and tapping of director Peyron Reed (Bring It On, Yes Man) indicates that the movie will have a strong comedic element.
Thanos (The Avengers: Infinity War, Part I: May 4, 2018 and Part II: May 3, 2019)
Yes, Age of Ultron is still half a year away, and we’re already talking about the third Avengers movie. Or, rather, the third and fourth Avengers movies. Marvel announced that The Avengers: Infinity War will be released in two parts because — well, why not?
The big bad in Avengers: Infinity War will be Thanos (Josh Brolin), first seen at the very end of The Avengers and again as an evil puppet-master in Guardians of the Galaxy who adopted and raised Gamora (Zoe Saldana). This hasn’t come up in the movies yet, but in comic book lore, Thanos is in love with the Mistress Death (the female embodiment of death — yes, really) and wants to impress her by killing everyone in the galaxy.
How does Thanos plan to do this? Well, he possesses this thing called the Infinity Guantlet — basically a metal glove encrusted with a lot of powerful gems that gives him power over time, space and all living beings. Yep — that’s a pretty serious weapon. Presumably Thanos doesn’t have all the gems he needs; otherwise, there would be no movie. Feige has said that the Tesseract from The Avengers was actually one of the Infinity Stones needed to make the gauntlet work, and so was the stone everyone’s trying to get their hands on in Guardians.
Given that Thanos has already appeared in two Marvel franchise, this movie is likely going to have a lot of superheroes in it.
Ragnarok (Thor: Ragnarok, July 28, 2017)
Thor: Ragnarok will have Thor’s Chris Hemsworth facing off against…Chris Hemsworth. Ragnarok is an evil cyborg clone of Thor created by an unexpected source.
Captain America vs. Iron Man (Captain America: Civil War, May 6, 2016)
The other major news in the world of the Avengers heroes is that Captain America 3 will follow the “Civil War” comics storyline. At this point, any interpretation of what that means is speculation, but here’s how it plays out in the comics.
After a superhero-related disaster, the U.S. government puts its foot down: all superheroes will have to register with the government. No more secret identities. Obviously, this is controversial among the masked men and women. Superheroes take their sides: Tony Stark becomes the poster boy of the government’s plan, while Captain America (despite his name) believes this is the first step towards fascism in America and goes underground. It’s at this point that Ragnarok comes into the picture, though I won’t spoil how.
Basically, expect some sort of supremely watchable epic battle between Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Evans. People are very excited about this.
Black Panther (Black Panther, Nov. 3, 2017)
Black Panther will be the first lead black superhero in a Marvel movie. (Up until now, Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury, Don Cheadle as Rhodey, Idris Elba as Heimdall and Anthony Mackie as Falcon have all played sidekick-type roles in the films. That may change in the upcoming Captain America movies, since it’s rumored that Mackie will get to take up the role of Captain America at some point.)
T’Challa, a.k.a. Black Panther, hails from the fictional country of Wakanda, a technologically advanced African nation. In the comic books, the Black Panther title is given to the chief of the Panther Tribe in Wakanda, which T’Challa’s father, T’Chaka, holds at the time of his birth. His father is later killed by Klaw over a a rare metal T’Chaka discovered called Vibranium. (Coincidentally, Captain America’s shield is made from this metal.) T’Challa, who has no superpowers, begins to train to avenge his father. He ends up living a double life in Wakanda and in America, where he befriends the Avengers. (He also has a relationship with X-Men’s Storm in the comic books, but since Marvel Studios doesn’t own the rights to X-Men, I doubt she’ll be showing up.)
The role of Black Panther will be filled by Chadwick Boseman, who’s played James Brown in Get on Up and Jackie Robinson in 42. And Marvel’s going all in with this hero. According to Deadline, he has signed up for five — yep, five — films as Black Panther (including, presumably, some Avengers films).
Captain Marvel (Captain Marvel, July 6, 2018)
Finally, Marvel Studios is making a woman-led superhero movie. Though the title of Captain Marvel has been held by men for many decades, in 2012, the mantle passed to a female character named Carol Danvers, previously known as Ms. Marvel. Danvers is part human and part Kree, an alien race you may remember from Guardians of the Galaxy. She trained in the Air Force, can fly, has super-strength and has been kicking ass since feminist comic book writer Kelly Sue DeConnick started penning her series.
Marvel is playing catch-up when it comes to female superheroes: Warner Bros. has already announced a Wonder Woman movie starring Gal Gadot (who will also appear in 2016’s Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice), and Sony has a movie based on a female character from the Spider-Man universe in the works. Feige struggled this summer to answer why they hadn’t already made a female led movie, but hinted that something like this was coming.
What about Black Widow?
The Captain Marvel announcement comes as something of a surprise, given that Marvel already has a major female superhero in its film arsenal: Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow. Black Widow, or Natasha Romanoff, works for the spy agency S.H.I.E.L.D. and has appeared in Iron Man 2, The Avengers and Captain America: Winder Soldier. Fans have been lobbying for Black Widow to get her own franchise, but Feige says they shouldn’t hold their breath.
“Black Widow couldn’t be more important as an Avenger, but like Hulk, the Avengers films will be the films where they play a primary role,” said Feige. “Her part in Avengers: Age of Ultron is very, very big and further develops her character. The plans we have for her through the rest of the Avengers saga are very big and she is a linchpin, in fact, to those films. So instead of taking her out there or doing a prequel which we haven’t done yet, we’re continuing the forward momentum of the continuity of the Cinematic Universe, of which Widow is a key part.”
Sorry, Scar-Jo fans.
Inhumans (Inhumans, Nov. 2, 2018)
The Inhumans movie will introduce dozens of new superheroes. The comic focuses on the royal family of the Inhuman race — the result of aliens called the Kree (again, see Guardians of the Galaxy) experimenting on Earth’s primitive homo sapiens to create genetically superior people. The Inhuman royal family is headed by Black Bolt, who can level a city with his voice.
Doctor Strange (Doctor Strange, November 4, 2016)
Marvel is officially headed for the supernatural realm — and there’s a possibility that Benedict Cumberbatch will be at the helm.
Doctor Strange starts out as an arrogant surgeon, then gets into a car accident that destroys his hands. (Those are kind of an important asset for a surgeon.) Desperate to find a cure for the loss of his fine motor skills, he searches the darkest corners of the world for a solution. Eventually he meets a person called The Ancient One who introduces him to the mystic arts. Eventually, Doctor Strange becomes the guy you turn to when you need to battle magical forces.
This movie promises a lot of psychedelic CGI. Expect it to be very different from the Avengers films. But Marvel proved this summer that it can succeed when it ventures off the beaten path. Which brings me to…
Guardians of the Galaxy (Guardians of the Galaxy 2, May 5, 2017)
Unless you spent this summer under a rock, you probably saw Guardians of the Galaxy, the highest-grossing movie of the year so far. And the Guardians are starting to serve as sort of a lynch pin for this whole universe; the Kree, which we first met this summer, pop up in the Inhumans and Captain Marvel origin stories. So though they seemed like a joke when that video of Bradley Cooper voicing a raccoon surfaced, they’re kind of a big deal now. For those of you who didn’t make it to the first movie, here’s the cast of rag-tag characters that will be returning in May 2017:
Peter Quill, a.k.a. Star-Lord (Chris Pratt): Kidnapped from earth as a kid, Quill is a human who becomes the leader of the Guardians.
Gamora (Zoe Saldana): The last of a race called the Zen-Whoberi, Gamora was hand-groomed as an assassin by the villain Thanos. But she turned on her adopted father to join the Guardians and is commonly known as the Most Dangerous Woman in the Universe.
Drax (Dave Bautista): A superhuman warrior out to avenge his murdered family.
Rocket Raccoon (Bradley Cooper): A talking raccoon with a fondness for large guns.
Groot (Vin Diesel): A talking tree that only says “groot.” Also enjoys dancing.
No Spider-Man…yet
Marvel licensed out the rights to Spider-Man to Sony long before it created its own studio. Though Feige didn’t make any announcements at this event, Marvel and Sony have reportedly been in talks to jointly own the character, allowing for a Spider-Man crossover into the Avengers universe.
Read next: Marvel Unveils Superhero Five-Year Plan
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There’s a muscle throbbing in Eddie Redmayne’s cheek, just under his right eye, a muscle most people don’t even know they can control. It pops out, bulbous, even as the rest of his freckled face stays still. Then Redmayne relaxes it. It looks like an impressive party trick, but it’s more than that. …
SodaStream announced Wednesday that it will move a controversial facility located in an Israeli settlement in the West Bank. The company said that their reason for moving was “purely commercial,” and not due to pressure from Palestinian activists.
The Israeli company will relocate its operations from Maaleh Adumim in the West Bank to Lehavim, northern Israel by 2015. “We are offering all employees the opportunity to join us in Lehavim, and specifically, we are working with the Israeli government to secure work permits for our Palestinian employees,” SodaStream CEO Daniel Birnbaum said, according to the Associated Press.
Palestinian activists launched a boycott of the company because of its location in the West Bank, land that Israel has controversially laid claim to since 1967. Up until now, the company has maintained that shutting down its facility—which employed 500 Palestinians, 450 Israeli Arabs and 350 Israeli Jews—would not benefit the cause for Palestinian statehood or the Israeli-Palestine peace process.
Scarlett Johansson was swept up in the controversy earlier this year when the actress stepped down from her position as an Oxfam International ambassador over her role as a spokesperson for SodaStream. The Avengers actress said she had a “fundamental difference of opinion” with the international charity, which opposes all trade from the Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
Johansson later defended the ad: “I’m coming into this as someone who sees that factory as a model for some sort of movement forward in a seemingly impossible situation,” she said. “Until someone has a solution to the closing of that factory to leaving all those people destitute, that doesn’t seem like the solution to the problem.”
Meanwhile, SodaStream has been having a hard time convincing U.S. consumers to buy at-home soda machines. Its third-quarter earnings dropped 14% from last year.
[AP]
Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani teen activist who recently won the Nobel Peace Prize, received another honor Wednesday and said she is donating the $50,000 in prize money to a United Nations agency that is rebuilding schools in Gaza following the summer conflict with Israel.
“The needs are overwhelming — more than half of Gaza’s population is under 18 years of age,” Malala said while being honored with the World Children’s Prize in Stockholm, according to a statement released by the U.N. Reliefs and Works Agency. “They want and deserve quality education, hope and real opportunities to build a future.”
Malala, who at age 15 survived being shot by the Taliban, has amassed a global following for work in the fight for girls’ right to education. The 17-year-old is the first person to receive the Children’s Prize and the Nobel Peace Prize in the same year.
Even the most devout Wonder Woman fanatics probably didn’t know that the heroine’s creator, William Moulton Marston, a psychologist, lived with and had children with two women at the same time. They also probably didn’t know that he had slightly strange theories about the benefits of bondage. Nor is it common knowledge that the character, which debuted in 1942, was inspired by the leaders of the suffragist movement.
In her new book, The Secret History of Wonder Woman, which hits shelves Tuesday, New Yorker writer and Harvard professor Jill Lepore delves into the life of the man who created Wonder Woman. The book comes just as Wonder Woman is swooping back into the cultural consciousness with her invisible jet. Israeli actress Gal Gadot will play Wonder Woman in 2016’s Batman vs. Superman and will get her own solo film in 2017.
Here’s just some of what Lepore uncovered:
1. Wonder Woman was inspired by Margaret Sanger (and other suffragists)
Creator William Moulton Marston, a psychologist, was deeply interested in gender dynamics, women’s rights and the suffragist movement.
He also fell in love with one of his students at Tufts, Olive Byrne, who eventually lived in his house with him and his wife in a sort of polyamorous relationship. Byrne happened to be Sanger’s niece, and Byrne’s mother, Ethel, and Sanger together opened what eventually became the first Planned Parenthood in 1916.
When Marston hired a woman named Joy Hummel to help him write Wonder Woman, Olive Byrne handed her one book to use as background: Margaret Sanger’s Woman and the New Race.
2. There’s a reason she’s bound up all the time
A recurring plot point in the early Wonder Woman comics was that if the superhero was bound by a man in chains she would lose all her Amazonian powers. So Wonder Woman was bound—a lot. This choice was partly inspired by the suffragists who chained themselves to buildings during protests and used chain symbolism to represent men’s oppression of women. But Marston was also preoccupied, perhaps even obsessed with, bondage.
He had a theory that women enjoyed submission and bondage and teaching young girls of that virtue was one of the purposes of the comic: “This, my dear friend, is the one truly great contribution of my Wonder Woman strip to moral education of the young,” Marsten wrote to his publisher after he was accused of sadism. “The only hope for peace is to teach people who are full of pep and unbound force to enjoy being found—enjoy submission to kind authority, wise authority.”
Wonder Woman’s subjugation was extremely controversial: Wonder Woman was banned in the 1940s because of the overt sexual nature of both her dress and the sexual nature of her near-constant bondage.
3. Wonder Woman was partly a response to the rise of the Nazis
The first comic book superhero, Superman, hit the stands in 1938. But shortly thereafter, comics came under fire: critics said Superman could be interpreted as a fascist—an all-powerful ubermensch that would have a negative influence on American children. (Remember, the rise of the superhero coincides with the rise of Nazi Germany.) Parents demand that the books be burned.
Superman publisher, M.C. Gaines, reads an article written by Olive Byrne for Family Circle saying that comic books might be good for kids. Gaines asks Marsten to help him save comic books, and Marston recommends a female superhero, reasoning that comic books are too violent and need a touch of femininity. Enter Wonder Woman.
4. The Lasso of Truth had a real-life parallel in Marston’s life
In the Wonder Woman comics, the heroine’s Lasso of Truth forces anyone in its snare to be honest. The weapon was likely inspired by Marston’s own creation of the lie-detector test in 1913. The basic test consisted of taking someone’s blood pressure as they answered questions. Any elevation in blood pressure signaled a subject’s guilt. In 1923, Marston fought to have results of his updated lie detector test used in courtrooms. But the courts rejected the machine, citing too high a frequency of error.
Marston was none-too-happy with this conclusion. In an autobiographical moment in the comics, Wonder Woman tries to get confessions made with the help of her Lasso of Truth admissible in court.
5. Wonder Woman was designed as a feminist icon
Anyone who has read Wonder Woman comics will be able to recognize the feminist underpinnings of her story. But readers probably don’t know that Marston broke from the rest of popular culture by asserting not only that kids would be interested in reading a comic about a woman but that she would be essential to their education in teaching them about gender equality.
“Like her male prototype, ‘Superman,’ ‘Wonder Woman’ is gifted with tremendous physical strength,” Marston wrote in the press release announcing her creation. “‘Wonder Woman’ has bracelets welded on her wrists; with these she can repulse bullets. But if she lets any man weld chains on these bracelets, she loses her power. This, says Dr. Marston, is what happens to all women when they submit to a man’s domination.”
He concludes: “‘Wonder Woman’ was conceived by Dr. Marston to set up a standard among children and young people of strong, free, courageous womanhood; and to combat the idea that women are inferior to men, and to inspire girls to self-confidence and achievement in athletics, occupations and professions monopolized by men.”
6. Despite that, she started out in the Justice Society as a secretary
Wonder Woman was admitted to the Justice Society with heroes like The Flash and Green Lantern after a survey of comic book readers found that the vast majority of girls and boys wanted her there.
But in a 1942 comic penned by Justice Society writer Gardner Fox, all the superheroes get to go off to fight the Nazis, except for Wonder Woman who must stay home and reply to the mail. Marsten was, of course, infuriated by this turn of events.
7. Wonder Woman has run for president in the comic books twice
Wonder Woman ran for office in a comic book written by Marston in 1943, and then again in a cover story in Ms. magazine in 1972. She didn’t win either time. Maybe she should try for 2016.
