Naomi Osaka Exposed a Problem With Sports Media

n the long run, sports media organizations might not have a choice but to move in this general direction. The implicit bargain among sports media, athletes, and teams used to be that the subjects would provide access, and in exchange the journalists would give the games publicity. That deal has lasted a long time, but today’s best athletes and biggest teams no longer need most of us in the media to get the word out. They can sell their broadcast rights to a media partner with or without press conferences. And Naomi Osaka, after all, didn’t need a team of reporters to get the word out about her views on press conferences. She just had to post them on Twitter and Instagram.

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Alex Kirshner — Slate

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Here’s What Critics Are Saying About Tenet

A new movie related post after a long time.

“Don’t try to understand it, feel it,” a cryptic scientist (Clémence Poésy) counsels the Protagonist early on, and whether Nolan intends it or not, this feels like solid advice for the viewer too. “Tenet” is not in itself that difficult to understand: It’s more convoluted than it is complex, wider than it is deep, and there’s more linearity to its form than you might guess, though it offers some elegantly executed structural figure-eights along the way.

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Marissa Martinelli — Slate

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How Herpes Became a Sexual Boogeyman

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If herpes is such a minor deal, why does it come with such a pervasive stigma? In the first half of the 20^th century, genital herpes was not on the public radar, and it wasn’t even recognized as a discrete type of herpes infection until the 1960s. But by the 1980s, it was slapped on the cover of Time with headlines like “Herpes: The New Sexual Leprosy.” What happened in the intervening years shows how a public sex panic is made. What’s still happening—herpes shame, fear, and confusion even now—shows how that panic can morph and persist. One of the oddest subplots of the stigma’s endurance has to do with who’s been falsely blamed for making herpes a boogeyman in the first place: drug companies.

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L.V. Anderson — Slate

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How Stephen Hawking Reclaimed His Voice—and Helped Others Do the Same

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His success serves as a powerful example of how people and machines can work symbiotically to unleash human potential. We can empower people across the entire range of abilities to express their creativity and engage in intellectual pursuits. While humans have always used tools and technologies to enhance their abilities, new developments in areas like artificial intelligence, machine learning, and human-machine symbiosis can advance this goal far more effectively, more efficiently, and faster. This increases accessibility to people across the ability spectrum and geographical boundaries.

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SETHURAMAN PANCHANATHAN — Slate

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The Family Man

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Now, that Trump has been thoroughly analyzed by all kinds of newspapers and news channels, the focus is shifting to his son-in-law Jared Kushner. What kind of person is he? How does he decide? Where do his loyalties lie?

He grew up in a fiercely loyal clan that flourished in large part because it understood that city councilmen and big-league developers made good bedfellows. Sometimes that coziness went too far: In 2005, Charles Kushner pleaded guilty to 18 counts of illegal campaign contributions, tax evasion, and witness tampering. (He’d attempted to blackmail his sister by hiring a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law, who was planning to deliver incriminating evidence to a judge in federal district court.) Charles was dealt a two-year prison sentence, just more than half of which he served. Jared, then in his mid-20s, traveled to Alabama every week to see his father in federal prison.

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Katy Waldman — Slate

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