On Halloween, the pop star Sabrina Carpenter uploaded a music video to YouTube for her new song “Feather.” That was a Tuesday. By the end of the week, a Catholic priest had been stripped of his administrative duties because of it. (Montali, The New York Times)
Read MoreThe Israel-Hamas war in the Middle East has sparked concerns about religious discrimination in the U.S., creating new fissures in a divided American electorate that could help shape next year’s presidential election. (Parti, The Wall Street Journal)
Read MoreOpinion polls show there is clearly pro-Palestinian sentiment among 18-24 year olds, but on TikTok this appeared off the scale. “For every one pro-Israel TikTok video that is viewed, 50 pro-Palestinian videos are viewed. And that to me was a bit of a puzzle,” he said. Those figures are for the US — in the UK the disparity was even wider, with a ratio of 1:65 at one point. (Sellman, The TImes UK)
Read MoreThe Journal sought to determine what Instagram’s Reels algorithm would recommend to test accounts set up to follow only young gymnasts, cheerleaders and other teen and preteen influencers active on the platform. Instagram’s system served jarring doses of salacious content to those test accounts, including risqué footage of children as well as overtly sexual adult videos—and ads for some of the biggest U.S. brands. (Horowitz & Blunt, The Wall Street Journal)
Read MoreThe new technique, transplant surgeons say, significantly expands the potential pool to patients who are comatose but not brain dead, and whose families have withdrawn life support because there is little chance of recovery. After these patients’ hearts stop, they are declared dead. But hearts are almost never recovered from these donors because they are often damaged by oxygen depletion during the dying process. (Goldstein, The New York Times)
Read MoreA course [called], “Artistry & Entrepreneurship: Taylor’s Version,”… will be available at Berkeley as a student-led, for-credit class during the spring semester, the latest in a wave of higher education offerings that highlight Swift’s ascent to global phenomenon. (Castleman, Los Angeles Times)
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