‘One factor will decide how much you enjoy TV next year’
Alan Sepinwall at The New York Times
If Netflix’s purchase of Warner Bros. goes through, Netflix and HBO “will become one,” says Alan Sepinwall. This “consolidation would mean that the streaming wars,” a “competition that resulted in innovative and exciting programming,” are over. Will TV “return” to being “low on risk, low on cost and concerned only with producing programming that brings in the biggest possible audience”? Netflix “can’t take its corporate victory as validation of its programming philosophy. It must not just absorb HBO; it must embrace the HBO approach.”
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‘Yes, women’s rights are under threat around the world. But we have found hope in unlikely places.’
Rahila Gupta at The Guardian
You might think that “women’s rights are being concreted over,” says Rahila Gupta. But “I found women’s resistance erupting like green shoots through the cracks.” Perhaps the “most inspirational advance in women’s rights” is “taking place in the unlikeliest of places”: the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (popularly known as Rojava). Here, women “have pinned their colors to secularism in recognition of the pernicious impact of religion” on their “freedoms.”
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‘Here is to a quarter century of US military havoc’
Belen Fernandez at Al Jazeera
It is “hard to understate the extent to which global events have been shaped by the military excesses of the United States” over the last 25 years, says Belen Fernandez. George W. Bush launched the “‘global war on terror,’” Barack Obama dropped “26,172 bombs on seven different countries” in his final year in office and Joe Biden expanded Washington’s “support for Israeli massacres of Palestinians.” Now, Trump’s “newly rebranded Department of War goes about blowing up boats willy-nilly off the coast of Venezuela.”
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‘We don’t need New Year’s resolutions. We need rest.’
Rachel Bearn at Time
“Conventional wisdom is that we should reinvent ourselves at the beginning of the new year,” says Rachel Bearn. But “January is not the time for reinvention,” it’s the time for “radical rest.” In winter, we should “follow nature” and “create our own version of hibernation,” preparing “slowly and quietly for the year to come.” When we “align ourselves with nature’s slower rhythm, we discover a gentler form of progress — the quiet kind that builds strength beneath the surface.”
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