What Happened: July 30, 2021

The Big Story

Top-earning movie star Scarlett Johansson is suing Disney for breach of contract in a lawsuit that highlights how digital technologies have the potential to upend established industries. At the core of Johansson’s suit is the claim that Disney cheated her out of profits she’s owed for starring in the Marvel action movie Black Widow by releasing the film on streaming platforms while it was still playing in theaters. Johansson claims that she made a deal with Disney, the studio behind the picture, to base a large part of her salary on the film’s performance in theaters with the understanding that it would have an exclusive theatrical release. Instead the film debuted on the July 9 weekend simultaneously in movie theaters around the world and on the streaming platform Disney+—which resulted in box office sales falling by 67% from its opening to its second weekend in theaters.

According to Deadline, the lawsuit filed Thursday in Los Angeles Superior Court claims that “by steering audiences to Disney+, the media conglomerate wanted to grow its subscriber base and boost its stock price” at Johansson’s expense. Disney countered with a statement claiming that the lawsuit has “no merit”—Johansson was already paid $20 million for her work in the movie—and defended the film’s release strategy as a response to the coronavirus pandemic.

While it may be difficult to sympathize with the plight of a wealthy celebrity such as Johansson, her wealth is what allows her to draw attention to the kind of foundational change that in the longer run can affect the lives of millions of ordinary people. In the music and journalism industries, for instance, the early push toward poorly conceived online distribution resulted in tens of thousands of jobs—many supporting middle class professionals—being eliminated over the past two decades.

Read it here: https://deadline.com/2021/07/scarlett-johansson-walt-disney-co-black-widow-lawsuit-1234802440/

Today’s Back Pages: Your Weekends Reads

The Rest

➥ A Black Lives Matter group has given U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island an ultimatum to either disavow an allegedly racist beach club or face constant protests. Last month Whitehouse said that while his wife and daughter do belong to the exclusive Bailey’s Beach club in Newport, Rhode Island, he does not—and would not ask them to resign. The club itself denied claims that its membership is exclusively white. A director of the Rhode Island chapter of Black Lives Matter told local news, “This club is a proven racist club with exclusive ties to supremacy and exclusion, and that’s something that’s not gonna be tolerated by me, by my associates, my affiliates, or my organization.” 

➥ A federal moratorium on evictions put in place as an emergency response to the pandemic is set to expire Saturday barring an 11th hour effort to extend it led by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Nine states, including New York, have policies to extend the eviction ban into August. It’s unclear how many people would be immediately affected by the ban ending. A Census Bureau survey showed 8.2 million adults reported being behind on their rent or mortgage as of July 5 and having low confidence in their ability to pay on time next month. The original moratorium was enacted last August as an executive order signed by President Trump but has subsequently been extended three times by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—the agency’s legal authority to do so is currently being debated in the courts. As of June, only 12% of the first $25 billion in funds from the Emergency Rental Assistance Program, set up last December by President Trump, has reached eligible recipients.

➥ An Israeli scientist in Harvard’s Astronomy Department is leading the search for alien life. Avi Loeb helms the Galileo Project, which uses a “network of telescopes and cameras to collect data” on unusual objects detected in space that could be indications of intelligent life in the cosmos.
Read it here: https://www.jpost.com/health-science/groundbreaking-project-shifts-search-for-aliens-from-military-to-science-674930

➥ Seven years after the mega chain store Hobby Lobby purchased a 3,500-year-old clay tablet that contains a portion of the “Epic of Gilgamesh,” arguably the oldest poem in existence, the U.S. government has seized the artifact and will return it to the government of Iraq. The mega chain store paid $1.6 million for the item in 2014, but U.S. authorities say that it was illegally shipped from Iraq and had already been sold on multiple occasions under a “false letter of provenance” before Hobby Lobby acquired it with the winning bid at a Christie’s auction. 

➥ More than 221 Afghans, including 72 children, have arrived in the United States after the first flight to evacuate individuals who worked alongside the U.S. military landed on Friday, just after midnight, in Dulles, Virginia. Details of the flight come from an internal U.S. government document obtained by The Associated Press. 

➥ An article in the Financial Times contrasts Western governments’ approach toward cryptocurrencies with the policy pursued by China: “Overall, the policy debate in western economies over crypto remains too narrow relative to the importance of the issues in play and excessively polarised...In contrast, China is pressing ahead with a more forceful, unified top-down vision, setting the stage for transformational dynamics that have the potential to extend well beyond the country itself.”
Read it here: https://www.ft.com/content/b9f6c876-22bb-498c-a425-78287455a3e1

➥ Welcome to dystopia: The Honolulu police department is using robot dogs to patrol homeless people in the city. The Hawaiian capital spent an estimated $150,000 in federal money earmarked for pandemic relief to buy a fleet of security robots made to resemble and imitate the movements of dogs—the same kind The Scroll previously reported were being used by the New York City Police department before that program was discontinued. An officer from the Honolulu Police Department’s community outreach unit defended the use of the robots, which can measure body temperatures, as a safe method of screening people for COVID-19. Boston Dynamics, the company that makes the robots, was founded in part with funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as the Pentagon’s startup incubator.

➥ Thinking of seeing Matt Damon’s new movie Stillwater? If you’re in the market for suspense and horror, you’ll do better to read this thread by Amanda Knox—whose life story was pillaged and manipulated by the filmmakers:

Does my name belong to me? My face? What about my life? My story? Why does my name refer to events I had no hand in? I return to these questions because others continue to profit off my name, face, & story without my consent. Most recently, the film #STILLWATER.

/ a thread

— Amanda Knox (@amandaknox) July 29, 2021

The Back Pages

—In her account of the skirmish between the reliably scandalous “Tiger Mom,” author Amy Chua, and her employer, Yale University, The Atlantic’s Elizabeth Bruenig lands on something that is “more revealing than any single aspect of the whole affair.” What exactly?

It has to do with the culture of elite institutions, where putatively righteous ends justify an array of troubling means, and noble public virtues like fairness and safety cloak more prosaic motives—the kind of vulgar envy and resentment that people with the best manners deny.

Read it here: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/07/amy-chua-yale-law-school-real-story-dinner-party/619558/


—Philosopher of the internet and sometime Tablet contributor Justin E.H. Smith writes about the always fascinating subject of violence. Smith, like Hannah Arendt before him, wants to interrogate what violence is—the problem of violence, as philosophers like to say—but also what it may yet become in the future:

Certainly, a powerful case can be made that the future of warfare lies not in trenches but in trolling and hacking, not with human soldiers but with bots. Whatever frightening potentials this new era holds, on balance I think I would rather see enemy nations fighting it out with sick burns on social media (as the IDF seems to enjoy doing with the mullahs of Iran), than with the lives of young men: not quite the engine of peace that in the 17th century G. W. Leibniz imagined reckoning machines would soon become,[6] but better than getting your guts blown out on the battlefield. 

Read it here: https://justinehsmith.substack.com/p/notes-on-violence


—A tribute from one legend, the rapper Pharoahe Monch, to another, his childhood friend Biz Markie. An ode to a lost time. 

The taxi pulled up to a vintage record store that had 45s in the window—hell, this place still had 78 rpm vinyl. You could smell old cardboard and molded wood as soon as you opened the door. A tall, elderly black man with a salt and pepper George Jefferson never removed his eyes from his newspaper when we walked in. I didn’t want to follow Biz around the store looking over his shoulder, so I pretended like I knew what I was doing. The hope was in these situations the owner would not realize what treasures they actually had and subsequently sell them under value.

Read it here: https://www.spin.com/2021/07/pharoahe-monch-biz-markie-tribute/