Questions Worth Asking (Maybe)

Are Facebook and Instagram addictive? And if so, what does that mean?

We know that nicotine, meth, heroin, alcohol and the like are addictive. Biochemists can lay out the specific mechanisms that make these substances difficult to quit using. But then there is talk about sex addiction, video game addiction, TV addiction, and social media addiction. Are those real addictions? Do they have a biochemical mechanism? Lots of talk right now about Facebook and Instagram addiction – in fact 41 states are suing Meta over this issue. Will be interesting to see how this plays out.

Breaking news: Forty-one states and the District of Columbia are suing Meta on Tuesday alleging the tech giant harms kids by building addictive features into Instagram and Facebook — a legal action that represents the most significant effort by state enforcers to rein in social media’s impact on children’s mental health.


Why are there fewer (lots fewer!) jump scares in horror movies in recent years? (Bo0!)

TL:DR – Filmmakers are scaring us more with horror than with things that go bump in the night.

Since 2014, the number of jump scares cranked out by Hollywood has fallen precipitously.
To understand what has changed, we investigated how jump scares doubled in density between the 1970s and 2014.


 

Is Taylor Swift the “Queen of all Media”?

Remember back in the late 1990s when Howard Stern took on the title of the “King of All Media”? At the time (before he made the jump to satellite radio) he had the top-rated syndicated radio show, a bestselling autobiography, a number-one movie based on the book, and a Billboard-pop-chart-topping soundtrack album for the movie.

Has Taylor Swift hit that same point now with her hugely successful concert tour that broke Ticketmaster, has the most successful concert film of all time, and has a chart-topping rerecording of her album 1989? Ponder the question for now, but we will revisit this issue in a few days.

million at the domestic box office during its opening weekend, making it the highest-grossing concert film in U.S. history, according to estimates from AMC Theaters.


What unexpected movie can I watch to celebrate Halloween?

Might I be so bold as to suggest the 1963 Roger Corman classic Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven, staring Vincent Price, Peter Lorre, Boris Karloff and very young Jack Nicholson? It has only a marginal relationship to Poe’s well-known poem beyond Price reciting a bit of it at the beginning and has Peter Lorre entering the movie as a raven.

The Raven is a comic romp that tells the story of a battle between two master sorcerers. The screenplay was written by horror great Richard Matheson, best known for authoring I Am Legend. Less well known is that Vincent Price’s character Dr. Erasmus Craven was the model for Marvel Comic’s Dr. Stephen Vincent Strange. (Wonder where that Vincent came from?) The Raven is currently available for streaming on Amazon Prime.

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