Aram Zucker-Scharff

“Scepticism of the notion that our entertainment consumption shapes our political perspectives only has traction if you think that we arrive at our political views rationally.”

– Magic effect: how Harry Potter has influenced the political values of the Millennial generation.

“Not being sure what story you’re in anymore is a different experience depending on whether or not you were expecting to be the hero of that story. Low-status men, and especially women and girls, often don’t have that expectation. We expect to be forgettable supporting characters, or sometimes, if we’re lucky, attainable objects to be slung over the hero’s shoulder and carried off the end of the final page. The only way we get to be in stories is to be stories ourselves. If we want anything interesting at all to happen to us we have to be a story that happens to somebody else, and when you’re a young girl looking for a script, there are a limited selection of roles to choose from.”

– I Was A Manic Pixie Dream Girl.

The homepage is dead, the section home page is dead, the app is dead and the social web has won—even at NYT. :

Traffic to the New York Times homepage fell by half in the last two years, according to the newspaper’s internal review of its digital strategy. Here’s the very stark chart: That’s not necessarily a reflection of any problems at the Times but the reality of how news is now distributed on the internet. Homepage traffic is declining at…

The new reality: news is all push, no pull.