From unknown to full-blown startler, Lupita Nyong’o's newest interview is adorable. [New York]

Bill Nye’s anti-creationist argument was poetry on its own; now, hear it set to music. [Geekosystem]

In honor of Jennifer Aniston’s birthday, a roundup of Rachel Green’s boyfriends. Ranked. [Crushable]

Channing Tatum is writing the Magic Mike sequel. By his own account it will be less plot, more pecs. [Hollywood.com]

Korine’s book depicts a race war in Florida, in which Vanilla Ice leads the white people and M.C. Hammer leads the black people, while “the Jewish people sit in trees.” Says the Amazon synopsis, “this debut novel from an underground filmmaker uses print, photographs, drawings, news clippings, handwriting, a poem, attempted diagrams, and clip art to enhance the text.”

Sounds… strange, at best. But if anyone can mold this bizarre novel into something remotely watchable, it’s probably Korine (for obvious reasons) and Franco. [via Indiewire]

Image credit: Rinee Shah

Chicken Milk

Definition: water

Source: ”As a child I only wanted milk, so my dad gave me water but called it chicken milk.” – Ivan C., Marlboro, New York

Announced in the New York Times this Sunday, the Getty Images initiative aims to chip away at stereotypes by changing the way women are presented in ads, magazines, and other media providers that fill their pages with Getty’s product. In an interview with The Cut, LeanIn.org editor Jessica Bennett explains the thinking behind the project: “We wanted workplace images and images of girls, but most importantly we wanted characters and subjects who had agency. Women in powerful poses. Some of the women in the workplace are literally leaning in, leading discussions, in standing positions.”

Bennett’s right when she notes that the hundreds of images women consume and internalize every day shape our expectations of what we can and should be. And if the Getty initiative can successfully promote the notion that women can, in fact, own bakeries and ride surfboards and age past 50 through the power of suggestion, more power to it. The problem doesn’t necessarily stem from the partnership itself; it’s the gap between the small but well-intentioned step of providing Getty clients with the option of running non-absurd images of women and Lean In’s stated goals.

In her excellent takedown “Facebook Feminism, Like It Or Not,” Susan Faludi highlights the extraordinary hype surrounding Lean In, both from outside parties and Sandberg herself. The author billed the organization’s namesake book as “sort of a feminist manifesto”; Time described Lean In as “an ambitious mission to reboot feminism.” Faludi, along with many other detractors, contrasts that rhetoric with Sandberg’s actual advice, which tends to focus more on what individual women can do to work within existing workplace norms rather than changing them. A look at Lean In’s blog doesn’t help its case much; recent spotlighted articles include “Sitting Tall: Letting Go of Ego to Get Ahead” and “How to Close the Gender Gap at Work? Strike a Pose.”

Faludi is especially critical of Lean In’s corporate partnerships, most of which involve minimal commitment on the part of the sponsor in return for the PR payoff that comes with expressing nominal support for workplace equality. (These “partners” include Wal-Mart, which narrowly avoided a massive class-action sex discrimination suit in 2011.) That brings us back to Getty initiative, which may require more of its “partner” than the average Lean In project, but reflects the flaws in Sandberg’s approach better than anything the book/website/quasi-movement has done thus far.

By working to alter images of women rather than the experiences those changes reflect, the Lean In Collection literally chooses surface over substance. Yes, it’s a problem that we don’t often see female paramedics or soldiers or even gamers, all professions and pastimes rendered in excellent quality throughout the Collection. But it’s a bigger problem that women are underrepresented in many of those professions in the real world. And even though Lean In is supposedly the project of a female CEO working to help other women reach her level of professional success, the nonprofit spends precious little time targeting some of the reasons why so few have.

Bennett even touches on the issue in her interview with The Cut. “The larger problem is that the majority of art directors and the majority of photographers are men,” she explains. “I read in Fast Company that only 3 percent of creative directors are women, and then we know what the numbers look like in Hollywood and journalism.” So, sexist industries create sexist content. But rather than targeting the norms in advertising, casting, or media that keep women, and therefore images made for or by them, out of decision-making roles, Lean In opted to work with a preexisting archive to designate which photos deserve to be labeled “empowering.” An archive that’s the product of a deeply biased industry that could use the further-reaching reforms that Lean In consistently shies away from advocating.

Ironically, the most promising part of the Getty initiative is also the least publicized. Along with the Lean In Collection, Getty is also offering a pair of grants in editorial and creative photography for original work focusing on “women, girls, and their families and communities.” It’s not quite a hard look at why most photography doesn’t represent women’s lived experience in the first place, but it’s a proactive effort to change it using the best incentive there is: cold, hard cash. It’s a more meaningful commitment to advancing Lean In’s supposed aims than simply putting Sandberg’s stamp of approval on a subset of photos — and inspires hope that someday, more than a thousandth of a percent of Getty’s stock image reserves will deserve that approval.

Of course, convincing companies to contribute real money to gender equity, whether through grants or just paying more women to work for them, is more difficult than two friends deciding to partner up over drinks, as Bennett and Getty image anthropologist Pam Grossman did. But until Lean In starts dedicating more resources to issues more pressing than a dearth of woman-led (fake) board meetings, it will simply show its detractors were right all along: Lean In is less a “movement” than a mutual PR backrub between a former executive and a collection of current ones. The burden’s on Sandberg to prove them wrong.

Update: I’m realizing that the shapes you create stay in the universe, floating around, so this is getting cooler.

Read Thom Yorke’s full statement below:

We have made an app called PolyFauna.

PolyFauna is an experimental collaboration between us (Radiohead) & Universal Everything, born out of The King of Limbs sessions and using the imagery and the sounds from the song Bloom.

It comes from an interest in early computer life-experiments and the imagined creatures of our subconscious.

Your screen is the window into an evolving world.
Move around to look around.
You can follow the red dot.
You can wear headphones.

DOWNLOAD: iOS / Android

Thom

[via Stereogum]

Much of Mozart in the Jungle seems based on the joke that band kids secretly love to party. Adapted from a book of the same name by the impressive trio of Roman Coppola, Jason Schwartzman, and Alex Timbers, Mozart in the Jungle is about the “raunchier” side of the classical music scene. It is, hands down, the most interesting premise of the group of pilots, although it runs the risk of being alienating to those who aren’t familiar with orchestra culture. But Mozart is just the right amount of zany — one standout scene has a group of band kids playing a version of spin the bottle that involves downing multiple shots while trying to play their instruments flawlessly; another scene features an orchestral Styx cover band. The pilot is also aesthetically wonderful (it was directed by About a Boy‘s Paul Weitz), and the lovely Gael García Bernal is always a pleasure to watch. Mozart isn’t perfect, but it’s a show that I’d love to see get picked up, if only to see where it could go.

The owners of a child star are like leaseholders—their property diminishes in value every year. Time’s chariot is at their back; before them acres of anonymity. Miss Shirley Temple’s case, though, has a peculiar interest: infancy is her disguise, her appeal is more secret and more adult. Already two years ago she was a fancy little piece (real childhood, I think, went out after The Littlest Rebel). In Captain January she wore trousers with the mature suggestiveness of a Dietrich: her neat and well-developed rump twisted in the tap-dance: her eyes had a sidelong searching coquetry. Now in Wee Willie Winkie, wearing short kilts, she is completely totsy. Watch her swaggering stride across the Indian barrack-square: hear the gasp of excited expectation from her antique audience when the sergeant’s palm is raised: watch the way she measures a man with agile studio eyes, with dimpled depravity. Adult emotions of love and grief glissade across the mask of childhood, a childhood that is only skin-deep. It is clever, but it cannot last. Her admirers—middle-aged men and clergymen—respond to her dubious coquetry, to the sight of her well-shaped and desirable little body, packed with enormous vitality, only because the safety curtain of story and dialogue drops between their intelligence and their desire.

Kind of ugly, yes? Greene was, of course, making a legitimate observation about the fetishization of a young star. The particular way this seems to shape up for young girls pairs badly with a fandom composed of “middle-aged men and clergymen.” And while nowadays Temple’s films are remembered as clean-cut and harmless, it’s certainly true that early in her career she was doing a lot of what were called “baby burlesks,” where small children were put into adult roles to spoof popular culture.

Greene chose to express his objection to all this, however, by calling her a “fancy little piece,” and repeatedly commenting on the shape of her body, and outright suggesting that she was seeking lascivious male attention in the way she “measures a man with agile studio eyes.” That was a remarkably incautious way to put it, not least because it’s obvious to everyone with eyes that child stars are somewhat oblivious to the way they are being bilked by adults. It is insane, even as a matter of rhetoric, to suggest that Temple was deliberately courting any untoward attention.

That said: Greene probably thought the magazine was too obscure for anyone to notice the remarks, but a firestorm ensued. And in fact, Temple and her backers brought a lawsuit for libel and won it. The little magazine folded, and Greene, according to a friend, may even have fled England for Mexico, fearing criminal libel charges would be brought. It seems fair to find that response, as the film blogger Self-Styled Siren once put it, “overwrought.” She adds: “As is true of many libel cases, if Temple’s parents hadn’t sued to get this paragraph out of the public discourse, it might have lapsed into obscurity. Instead it’s immortal.”

I rather agree. That said, there is a non-legal level on which this small incident encapsulates everything that’s both weird and wonderful about the career of Shirley Temple, a career that in our own time at least is still chiefly remembered and celebrated by adults. And some of those adults might rightly be accused of being the kind of middle-aged men and clergymen Greene refers to. Maybe that’s the discussion about child stars we still need to have, all these decades later.

Although he can claim to have been part of the iconic 4AD roster in its heyday, and has consistently put out excellent albums, today marks a milestone in Kozelek’s career: the release of Sun Kil Moon’s Benji. Pitchfork’s Brandon Stosuy calls the record “astonishing,” among many rhapsodic early reactions from critics. Kozelek is no stranger to critical acclaim, but the reception this album has already received suggests the possibility that Benji might become the defining album of his long career. Still, it’s got a lot to live up to — namely, these highlights from Kozelek’s discography.

Red House Painters (“Rollercoaster”), Red House Painters (1993)

This is one of the albums people cite when attempting to define the sound of 1990s indie. The second Red House Painters self-titled album (the one fans call “Bridge”) is also worth listening to, but the haunting, confessional sound that issues from your speakers in the opening notes of “Grace Cathedral Park” will leave you wondering how something so sad could feel so perfect.