 |
|
|
|||||
Disability rights could be under threat. People with disabilities are protected from discrimination and given equal access to education, healthcare, employment, and public services under Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. However, Republican attorneys general in 17 states (Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, and West Virginia) have sued the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), asking courts to declare Section 504 unconstitutional. Last May, HHS required that 504 services be provided to people experiencing gender dysphoria. The lawsuit argues that gender dysphoria doesnt fall under the definition of who should get 504 services. However, it then goes on to ask that 504 be eliminated entirely. Because Section 504 is coercive, untethered to the federal interest in disability, and unfairly retroactive, the Rehabilitation Act is not constitutional, the lawsuit argues. What will happen if 504 is eliminated? If 504 is rolled back, it would be up to individual states to decide how much they want to protect people with disabilities from discrimination, as well as which servicesif anythey want to provide. This includes services like 504 plans, in which schools lay out the individual accommodations that students with disabilities will receive (for example, extra time on tests or braille notes) so these students can participate in class. Currently, 8.5 million students in public schools have 504 plans. The first round of legal briefs is due on February 25. How to support disability rights ADDitude magazine is encouraging people to contact their state representatives and senators and voice their support for 504. If you live in a state thats suing to eliminate 504, you can also contact your attorney general and request that your state withdraw from the lawsuit. If you live in a state thats not suing to eliminate 504, you can contact your attorney general and ask that your state submit a brief on the importance of 504 protections.
Category:
E-Commerce
Yellowjackets is back with more chaos, more wildernessand a main title that is grungier than ever.Ever since the first season premiered in 2021, the shows opening credits have been one of the most frenetic on television. Blink and youll miss something. Set against the grungy song No Return by Craig Wedren and Anna Waronker, the title is meant to feel like an assault on the senses. It is 90 seconds long, and the longest frame lasts about a second.This makes for a tense intro, in which our brains are bombarded with flickering images faster than we can process them. And thats precisely the point. We want this to be glitched so much that if someone takes a still, they cant really figure it out, says Mason Nicoll, executive creative director of creative studio Digital Kitchen.Digital Kitchen, which has designed main titles for True Blood, Narcos, and Dexter, first dreamed up the concept for the Yellowjackets main title in 2021, when season one premiered. The show is set in the 90s, and the team drew inspiration from 90s skater videos, and drew from the jittery, low-fi aesthetic of the 1999 film The Blair Witch Project. The result was borderline chaotic, but the distressed look provided an additional benefit: it helped disguise key shots by distorting them beyond recognition.[Image: courtesy Digital Kitchen]The team has replicated this approach ever since. But with each season, they swap old frames for new ones that hint at whats to come. Season one teased the shows mysterious symbol, season two introduced eerie snowy landscapes and blood-soaked imagery. Season three now features dark caves, an upside-down image of a bleeding Jesus, and a lot of screaming faces. Its also glitchier than ever. We went to town, says Nicoll, noting that the first cut was about 30% more hectic than the final version.Does this hint at even more madness to come? It seems like it, he says. It does feel like every season just escalates and gets crazier.Season 3 title sequence: No context, just vibes The truth is, Nicoll doesnt know what will happen this season. Not exactly. Sometimes, main title designers get a full synopsis to help them sprinkle in clues. Other times, they only see the pilot and work with the showrunners to create the right tone. With Yellowjackets, Nicoll says he knew the most in season oneand the least in season three. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Digital Kitchen (@digitalkitchen)This year, the showrunners sent the team a whopping 70 shots to work with, but Nicoll explains the shots were all out of context, so his team had to piece the story together and interpret it themselves. It goes without saying they have more insight than the average viewer, but when the shots arrive at random, some mystery remains inevitable.[Image: courtesy Digital Kitchen]Sometimes, the team gave away too much without even realizing it. Thats what happened when the team initially included a new shot of the Antler Queen from season three in the title sequence. If you remember, the identity of the Antler Queen was shrouded in mystery for the first two seasons. At first, we thought it was Lottie. Thenspoilers aheadwe learned it was actually Natalie.So, when Digital Kitchen added this new shot of the Antler Queen, the showrunners reaction, as Nicoll remembers it, was something along the lines of: hell no! The team quickly reworked the shot, glitching it so much that viewers could no longer tell who was under the antlers. The obscured frame now appears around the one-minute markand we are left to wonder: has the wilderness chosen a new Antler Queen?A Blair Witch Project fever dreamAbout half of the shots in the main title come from the show, but the intro wouldnt be the disquieting fever dream it is today without the other half. From the very beginning, Digital Kitchen leaned into The Blair Witch Projects found footage aesthetic, making it seem like the images were filmed by the high school girls themselves.[Image: courtesy Digital Kitchen]To make this footage appear authentic, the team hired lookalike actors in L.A. and shot additional scenes with an old DV camcorder from the 90s. In one scene, art director Rachel Brickel filmed the actors running into a parking lot while she was crouched inside a shopping cart that Nicoll was pushing. I remember thinking I see a speed bump in front of us, and Im like oh man this is going to hurt,' she recalls with a laugh. It did hurt, but she got the shot.[Image: courtesy Digital Kitchen]To achieve the look of a worn-out VHS tape with a corrupted signal, Brickels team played the footage through a really old tube TV from the 90s and ran it through special equipment to further remix and distort the picture. Then, they took that altered footage and glitched it even more on the computer. We wanted to show the beauty of glitches, she says.[Image: courtesy Digital Kitchen]The resulting aesthetic of the Yellowjackets season 3 title sequence may not be ideal for someone prone to migraines. I, for one, cant watch it more than twice in a row without needing to rest my eyes. But for the average viewer who isnt poring over every single frame, the intro isnt meant to be fully absorbed in one sitting. Its designed to reveal itself as the season unfoldsand to keep you away from that dreaded skip button.
Category:
E-Commerce
The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has updated its website, and in theory, it’s a model of government transparency. The site lists savings the department claims to have made from cuts, along with bar charts and tables that purport to show the department’s work and the size and scope of the federal government. But there’s a big problem: You can’t trust the numbers. The website’s homepage is a feed of DOGE’s X posts, and there are pages that claim to show savings, list government spending, and number the size of the executive branch workforce, its total wages, and federal regulations. When the site was updated this week with new data, DOGE initially showed what it claimed was more than $16 billion saved from spending cuts. But the biggest line item in the department’s so-called wall of receipts incorrectly stated an $8 million contract canceled for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was for $8 billion. That error alone cuts the savings DOGE claims to have achieved roughly in half. Screenshots of various infographics on the doge.gov site, taken February 20, 2025 [Images: Doge.gov] Elon Musk, who President Donald Trump tapped to lead DOGE’s efforts, attempted to inoculate himself from errors while speaking last week in the Oval Office, acknowledging, “We will make mistakes, but we’ll act quickly to correct any mistakes.” Still, the site doesn’t make it easy to fact-check DOGE’s work. Though its “wall of receipts” co-opts the design of a spreadsheet and includes links to Federal Procurement Data System receipts, it isn’t sortable by column, and it front-loads cuts that are red meat to Trump’s base, like media subscriptions for Politico Pro and Bloomberg Terminal that government officials used to stay informed about their jobs. An NPR review of the more than 1,100 contracts DOGE initially listed found just $2 billion in savings from contracts that it could confirm were canceled, a number that grew to $6.5 billion in savings when accounting for contracts that hadn’t yet been canceled as of Wednesday but that DOGE included in its total nonetheless. NPR and current and former federal contracting officers it spoke to found other examples where DOGE data may be inaccurate, like line items that claim to be for a contract’s maximum-though-not-necessarily-actual value or that don’t take into account contracts that have been partially spent already. In the grand multitrillion scheme of government spending, $2 billion is actually quite minuscule. In fact, SpaceX, just one of Musks businesses, has contracts with the Defense Department worth roughly $22 billion. The DOGE website’s data visualization includes bar charts with a hover effect, so bars change colors when users move their mouse over data like federal employee salary or years of tenure, and tables for spending list columns like “agency,” “description,” and “value.” Visually, the effect is one of authority and accuracy. Beyond the flash, however, is a site that claims to show citizens what DOGE is doing but does more to obscure the facts and overwhelm with details than it does to inform. It’s a shrewd political play that creates the perception of methodology and empirical fact, but is really just data visualization as propaganda.
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||