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Fascinating Characters, Plots Make ‘The Boys’ a Must-Watch Show, Despite Gratuitous Gore

Forrest Hartman

If The Boys has a flaw, it’s the franchise’s much-celebrated violence and gore. Because the show prides itself on the sort of hyperrealism that is generally avoided in superhero flicks (how, after all, can Flash punch someone at super speed without dismembering them) a few characters meet a tremendously bloody end in every show. Obviously, some fans relish this. I find the gore self-indulgent and believe it distracts from the generally fantastic plotting that punctuates each season.

How Self-Publishing Made One Author a Best-Seller

The Editors

"I wanted more control over not just the creative writing, but also the marketing strategy, cover art, and other business aspects of publishing. I grew frustrated being unable to make these decisions going the traditional publishing route," she says. "I'm both a writer and entrepreneur, and I'm enjoying more creative and financial rewards than I ever have." For Michaels, who says the initial idea of going indie was "taking a leap off a cliff and hoping you can fly before you crash," the resulting benefits have exceeded her expectations.

The Ongoing Revolution of Television

Veronica Mendez

Media platforms like Netflix, Hulu, and even Amazon have all released successful series this past season. They have lured big-time writers and directors like Weed's Jenji Kohan and “Fight Club’s” David Fincher. TV is now drawing big-time players like Matthew McCaughey (True Detective), Martin Scorsese (Boardwalk Empire), and John Goodman (Alpha House) to the small screen,  which was unthinkable 10 years ago.Yet this “Golden Age” in TV also means fierce competition. With the rise in popularity of digital platforms like Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu, the television landscape has been severely altered. 

A Decline in Black-Owned Bookstores Signals a Worrisome Publishing Trend

Frederick Lowe

The number of African-American-owned bookstores has dropped significantly since the late 1970s and 1980s due to a variety of factors, including corporate control of the Internet, waning literacy and fiscal mismanagement. In the 1970s and 1980s, more than 1,000 black-owned bookstores were in business in the United States. Now only slightly more than 100, possibly 116 to 117, if that many, remain open.

Hold the Ethics: Surveillance, Data Mining and the Destruction of Personal Privacy

Tyler Huggins

The drive to destroy the private sphere of consciousness inextricably links Moore's law and Singularity with advances in surveillance, data mining and the systematic destruction of personal privacy. Singularity and privacy will not coexist, although the technology that propels us toward the Singularity needs privacy and its destruction to study human intelligence more acutely. As private consciousness becomes more available for examination and translation, Singularity becomes more realistic. 

Crashing the All-White Party in Silicon Valley

Semany Gashaw

In a thriving Bay Area technology sector where black and brown faces are the exception and not the norm, Chris Cruz, a Filipino American, and Isaac Reed, an African American, are crashing the party. A study conducted in 2011 by three California-based groups looked at workforce diversity at a dozen companies in Silicon Valley, including industry giants Intel, Cisco and Ebay, and found an industry where African Americans and Latinos are grossly underrepresented when compared to their percentages of the state population.

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