Each Friday we compile a list of interesting links and articles our editors find from across the web. Here’s what’s catching our eye this week.
HBO Go will be available to non-cable subscribers and Friends coming to Netflix in 2015:
Some world-changing conflicts start with speeches. Others, with explosions. Yesterday, a war began with a press release. At about 12 p.m. ET on Wednesday, word broke that HBO had finally agreed to make its wildly popular, highly pirated HBO Go service available to non-cable subscribers. Though the details were scarce, it seems clear that at some point next year, all of your cord-cutting friends and acquaintances who have “borrowed” your legit HBO Go password in the same way King Joffrey “borrowed” Ned Stark’s skull will be able to sign up themselves. In exchange for a nominal monthly fee — likely about $15 a month, or the same price as an HBO subscription through a cable provider — these former scofflaws will have the same total access to HBO’s huge catalogue of original series, Hollywood movies, and whatever it was Real Sex was supposed to be.
A student gun and bomb threat ends an Anita Sarkeesian university talk:
Anita Sarkeesian, creator of the popular Tropes vs. Women video series, is at the center of yet another death threat. The Standard Examiner reports that the director of Utah State University’s Center for Women and Gender, along with several other people, received an email promising a mass shooting if they didn’t cancel a speaking engagement for Sarkeesian, who was scheduled to talk at the center on Wednesday morning.
Want to find out how the movie ends? There’s a new site devoted to Netflix spoilers:
Do you shun “spoilers,” those unwanted revelations of crucial plot points from someone who has seen a movie or television show that you haven’t watched yet? Then you’ll hate a new Netflix NFLX -19.37% site called “Living With Spoilers,” which gives away major plot twists from the big and small screen.
Reflections on the 1994 film Pulp Fiction:
1. Let’s Talk About Hair — Oh, and Women’s Shoes. Don’t Forget Women’s Shoes. Premiering 20 years ago this month, Pulp Fiction was the movie that turned Quentin Tarantino into, you know, Quentin Tarantino. That’s enough all by itself to make landmark status a lock, right? Right. By now, though, the average professor of Tarantino studies at good old STFU must despair over whether trainee film buffs can untangle what was so original about his Rubik’s Cubist assemblage of talking jags, nonchalant mayhem, confetti chronology, and cartoon-cutout characters. They’ve been scarfing up variations on it since they were kindergartners, after all, and nobody goes to college to find out who invented pepperoni.
Oral Roberts and the fall of the first televangelism family:
The fall of the first family of televangelism came swiftly. Two Oral Roberts Ministries employees crouched on a desk on their hands and knees, their heads sticking through a hole in the wall. The voices of the Oral Roberts University Board of Regents on the speakerphone conference call one floor below carried up through the thin ceiling panels. Patriarch Oral Roberts was urging Richard, his successor, not to go on Larry King Live that evening. “I think I should,” they heard Richard tell his father. Oral thought Larry King would eat Richard alive.
Cooking eggs may be more interesting than you think:
Cooking eggs may seem like a pedestrian activity for anyone with any sort of kitchen prowess, but YouTube proves that there are myriad ways beyond scrambling, poaching and even shirring to prepare your morning protein. What follows is a playlist of sorts that captures the odd, interesting, offbeat, and occasionally disgusting ways eggs can go from farm to table.
Some popular Halloween costumes from 1884:
Are you seized with panic because you can’t think of a costume for this year’s Halloween celebrations? Relax, we’ve got you covered—well, technically Male Character Costumes, a Guide to Gentlemen’s Costume Suitable for Fancy Dress Balls and Private Theatricals, an 1884 costume guide, has you covered. We’ve combed through the illustrated text and found 12 of the best costumes that still hold up in 2014. (Basically, we picked the 12 that aren’t racially or culturally insensitive—people in 1884 were awful).
Where the Common Core standards went wrong:
Even before the Common Core State Standards initiative was officially unveiled in June 2010, dozens of states had already pledged to adopt the standards. By the end of 2010, 39 states and the District of Columbia had adopted the new education standards for reading and math with little fuss or controversy. The initiative was cheered on by an impressive array of supporters: President Obama, prominent Republicans like Jeb Bush and Chris Christie, the heads of national teachers’ unions, the United States Chamber of Commerce, and the Business Roundtable. Supporters billed the Common Core as a state-led, technical, apolitical exercise that would modernize and rationalize American education. In fact, even as most Americans remained unaware that the Common Core existed, Arne Duncan, the Obama administration’s secretary of education, declared that “the Common Core State Standards may prove to be the single greatest thing to happen to public education in America since Brown v. Board of Education.”
Pubs may actually be important for community health:
Twenty years ago, John Major was ridiculed when he promised that, 50 years hence, Britain would “survive unamendable in all essentials”, with “old maids cycling to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn morning”. He was, of course, quoting George Orwell, having cut out the section of the essay England Your England in which Orwell talked about the clatter of clogs in a Lancashire mill town and the rattle of pin tables in Soho pubs.
100 years of football history. In pictures:
In 1914 tens of thousands of spectators flocked to the newly built Yale Bowl to cheer for the annual Yale-Harvard football game. The new stadium could seat up to 60,000 fans, far more than the roughly 2,500 who attended the first game between the college rivals, in 1875. (Related: “Pictures: Kickoff Time for Green Stadiums”)