Everyone knows it's hard to get college students to do the reading'remember books' But the attention-span crisis is not limited to the written word. Professors are now finding that they can't even get film students'film students'to sit through movies. 'I used to think, If homework is watching a movie, that is the best homework ever,' Craig Erpelding, a film professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told me. 'But students will not do it.' I heard similar observations from 20 film-studies professors around the country. They told me that over the past decade, and particularly since the pandemic, students have struggled to pay attention to feature-length films. Malcolm Turvey, the founding director of Tufts University's Film and Media Studies Program, officially bans electronics during film screenings. Enforcing the ban is another matter: About half the class ends up looking furtively at their phones. A handful of professors told me they hadn't noticed any change. Some students have always found old movies to be slow, Lynn Spigel, a professor of screen cultures at Northwestern University, told me. 'But the ones who are really dedicated to learning film always were into it, and they still are.'...
Recently, I watched a new documentary about an enigmatic woman of notable charm and courage preparing for one of the most momentous events in her life. That woman is E. Jean Carroll, and the movie is Ask E. Jean, a feature about Carroll's life and her decision to sue President Trump in civil court for defamation and sexual battery. In 2019, Carroll alleged that Trump had sexually assaulted her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the mid-1990s; Trump promptly denied the allegation while deriding Carroll at rallies and in TV interviews as 'totally lying' and 'not my type.' Ask E. Jean follows Carroll as she prepares for the trial, revealing why she buried what had happened for so long; it captures, too, her profound discomfort while she's badgered during depositions by Trump's legal team, and her eventual victory. (The jury found Trump liable for the sexual abuse and defamation of Carroll and ordered him to pay $5 million in compensation; Trump's appeal is currently awaiting review by the Supreme Court.)...
Hours after Alex Pretti was killed by federal agents in Minneapolis on Saturday, Apple CEO Tim Cook and Amazon CEO Andy Jassy showed up for a movie night at the White House. Along with other business executives and several prominent Donald Trump supporters, they attended a private screening of Melania, a new documentary about the president's wife. The moviegoers were treated to buckets of popcorn and sugar cookies frosted with the first lady's name. Silicon Valley's top executives have seemingly taken every opportunity to cozy up to Trump. During his inauguration a year ago, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai, Elon Musk, and Cook sat smiling behind the president in the Capitol Rotunda. The obsequiousness has not stopped since: In August, Cook presented Trump with a custom plaque atop a 24-karat-gold base in the Oval Office. At a White House dinner the next month, the Google co-founder Sergey Brin praised Trump's 'civil rights' work, and OpenAI's Sam Altman described Trump's leadership as a 'refreshing change.' Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, and Google are among the companies that have made donations to fund the new White House ballroom....
My local Target was the first place I noticed the shift. One day, a few years ago, a sign appeared: red text on white paper announcing that no one under 18 would be allowed in without an adult. Before the poster, every weekday afternoon, clots of teens would move through the arteries of the store, occasionally blocking them. The kids would laugh among themselves, swatch makeup on their arms, peruse the candy offerings. I suppose they made the shopping experience a little more chaotic, but I personally never saw them do anything worse than talk loudly, or loiter in the way of someone trying to reach the face wash. They reminded me of me and my friends when I was young'hanging out in a store just for something to do, somewhere to be. And then the sign went up, and the teens disappeared. My Target is just one of many U.S. businesses that have issued restrictions in recent years on unaccompanied minors. These policies are frequently enacted in places where teens like to congregate, such as malls, restaurants, movie theaters, and theme parks. Some places ban teens entirely, or just on certain days or during certain hours. Comprehensive data on how many businesses have these rules are hard to come by. But the anecdotes are piling up. Kathleen Blum, who leads shopper insights at the market-research firm C+R Research, told me that she's seen 'an uptick' in such policies over the past few years....
