Facebook, Battle, Branch, Century, Mutant
The Horrors Of Being A Facebook Moderator
Vice | YouTube | 21st July 2021
A former Facebook moderator estimates that between five and ten percent of what he saw every day was potentially traumatizing. "When we first started, I got this super close-up shot of a man jerking off." After one of his coworkers deleted the video for him, "she cleaned the desk, the keyboard and her own hands...Thinking about that later, I realized that we really do feel touched by what we see" (7m 36s)
Joe Dante's Battle With Hollywood
The Royal Ocean Film Society | YouTube | 21st July 2021
The trials and tribulations of director Joe Dante; his "Inferno" was 2003's Looney Tunes: Back in Action. The studio seemed to misunderstand the animation medium—as Dante put it, "the problem came when the studio executives started to get tired of our jokes and wanted us to change them. But of course, the animation is done to the voices and not the other way around" (39m 22s)
The US Needs A Fourth Branch Of Government
The Context | YouTube | 19th July 2021
Should the Inspector General really work for the people he investigates? Inspector General Glenn Fine investigated "the FBI under President Clinton, abuses of the Patriot Act under President Bush, and counterterrorism ineffectiveness under President Obama"—until last year, when Trump decided to fire him. Thus the proposal: a fourth branch of government for "oversight" (8m 25s)
Centuries And Still
Sally Tran | Vimeo | 13th June 2021
The story of anti-Asian racism in America. The history itself is nothing too obscure (the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the 1982 murder of Vincent Chin, etc.), but the art is exquisite, evolving from 16mm to Super 8 to VHS to digital to match the changing times as a series of impressionistic tableaux guide us through the brutal history on display (4m 37s)
Browser Video Of The Week: Soumaya Keynes
Baiqu Gonkar sits down with Soumaya Keynes, European Economics Editor for The Economist, on the best way to learn economics, how to combine home treadmills with insightfully trashy TV, and the value of cheesy-sounding self-improvement habits (23m 22s)
Funny Video Of The Week
Animated short—a few wisecracking mutants float through the dystopic wreckage of future New York
Watch The Viewer's recommendations each week as a handy YouTube Playlist.
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