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Fashion is off the hamster wheel, taking a deep breath that is allowing some freshness to seep into the once relentless cycle. “It is so weird thinking about fashion, and the kind of hamster wheel of fashion, and how we never had a break and always complained about it,” Marc Jacobs said during a Milan Fashion Week video chat with Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons post-digital show. “And then you get a break, and you complain.” Instead, he said, he was taking the moment to watch others, and be inspired. Milan Fashion Week of mostly womenswear previews for next fall and winter wrapped a nearly all-digital edition this week. Only one designer — Daniel Del Core, marking his brand’s debut — held a live runway show for a small number…

TikTok’s Chinese parent company ByteDance has agreed to pay $92 million in a settlement to U.S. users who are part of a class-action lawsuit alleging that the video-sharing app failed to get their consent to collect data in violation of a strict Illinois privacy law. The federal lawsuit alleged that TikTok broke the Illinois biometric privacy law, which allows suits against companies that harvest consumer data without consent, including via facial and fingerprint scanning. Illinois is the only state with a law that allows people to seek monetary damages for such unauthorized data collection. “While we disagree with the assertions, rather than go through lengthy litigation, we’d like to focus our efforts on building a safe and joyful experience for the TikTok community,”TikTok said in an emailed statement. Facebook agreed…

If you’re coming to “ Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry ” hoping for a primer on the music sensation, you’ve come to the wrong place. Filmmaker R.J. Cutler’s two hour and 20-minute documentary about the “Ocean Eyes” singer and songwriter is not biography or reportage. It’s a verite-style plunge into her life, her home, her concerts, her process, her Tourette’s, her brother’s bedroom where they famously write all their songs and even her diary in the year in which she became a star. It is raw and filled with music — over 20 of her songs are played over the course of the film, including live performances, like her extraordinary Coachella showing in 2019. Some are shown in full. It is also very, very long. Cutler, who also…

When you combine the creative genius of probably the best horror writer of the modern area and one of the best and most respected producers of our era, you are probably going to get a product that is going to be a masterpiece in its own right. Well, in 2021, we are going to have our assumption tested as Stephen King and J.J. Abrams are working on an adaptation of King’s 2006 novel, Lisey’s Story, that is set to air on Apple TV+ sometime in the course of the year. In this article, we are going to tell you everything we know about the show so far so you can prepare yourselves for watching. Lisey’s Story is a recent Stephen King novel and has not yet achieved the status of…

In Florian Zeller’s “The Father,” Anthony, 80, in the grip of dementia, is a captain ready to go down with the ship. Overhearing his daughter and son-in-law contemplating a nursing home, he curses them as “rats” abandoning him. Pacing his London apartment in a bath robe, he mounts a noble resistance. “I am not leaving my flat!” he shouts. But if the battle lines are clear for Anthony, little else is. Every time Anthony leaves a room, when he re-enters, the light has shifted, the furniture is rearranged and sometimes even the people are different. In staging and perspective, “The Father” mimics the disorientation of dementia. Anthony, a regally theatrical man played by Anthony Hopkins, is an actor who every time he takes the stage, the scene has changed before…

Volvo says it will make only electric vehicles by 2030. But if you want one, you’ll have to buy it online. The Swedish automaker said this week that it is phasing out the production of all cars with internal combustion engines —including hybrids. “There is no long-term future for cars with an internal combustion engine,” said Henrik Green, Volvo’s chief technology officer. Volvo’s announcement follows General Motors’ pledge earlier this year to make only battery-powered vehicles by 2035. Volvo also said that, while its all-electric vehicles will be sold exclusively online, dealerships will “remain a crucial part of the customer experience and will continue to be responsible for a variety of important services such as selling, preparing, delivering and servicing cars.” As part of the announcement, the Swedish automaker will…

Beijing isn’t ready to follow the United States in allowing Boeing’s 737 Max back into the air after a pair of fatal crashes two years ago. China was the first country to ground the 737 Max in 2019 after crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia killed a total of 346 people. American regulators approved the plane in November to resume commercial flights after Boeing made technical changes and a new training regime was put into place for pilots. “Major safety concerns” raised by Chinese regulators have not been fully resolved, said Dong Zhiyi, deputy administrator of the Civil Aviation Administration of China, at a news conference. Design changes must pass approval for airworthiness, pilots must receive “effective flight training” and conclusions of investigations into the two crashes must be clear, Dong…

Twitter is branching out from advertising to find more ways to make money — both for itself and for its most prolific users, whether those are businesses, celebrities or regular people. In an investor presentation, the social media company announced a new feature called “Super Follows,” which will let users charge for extra, exclusive material not shown to their regular followers. This can include subscriber-only newsletters, videos, deals and discounts. Users would pay a monthly subscription fee to access the extra content. Twitter users — and the company’s investors — have long been asking it to launch a subscription-based model. This as a growing number of internet creators and influencers use tools like Patreon, Substack and OnlyFans to make money from their online popularity. The subscriptions will also allow Twitter…

Though Apple Music may still be playing catchup to Spotify in terms of users, new data from the Mechanical Licensing Collective has revealed Apple is the industry leader when it comes to royalties, demonstrating the company’s commitment to paying talent. As Apple continues to expand its services, the future looks bright, with new Music innovations coming their way. AT THE TOP SPOT In a perhaps unsurprising announcement, Apple was named in mid-February as the biggest contributor of music streaming royalties in the world, ahead of rivals Spotify, Amazon Music, and YouTube. According to the Mechanical Licensing Collective, streaming services have paid out more than $424,384,787 in revenue to musicians and labels to date, with Apple Music contributing the biggest share with $163,338,890 paid out. The figure represents “historical unmatched royalties…

China-based government hackers have exploited a bug in Microsoft’s email server software to target U.S. organizations, the company said this week. Microsoft said that a “highly skilled and sophisticated” state-sponsored group operating from China has been trying to steal information from a number of American targets, including universities, defense contractors, law firms and infectious-disease researchers. Microsoft said it has released security upgrades to fix the vulnerabilities to its Exchange Server software, which is used for work email and calendar services, mostly for larger organizations that have their own in-person email servers. It doesn’t affect personal email accounts or Microsoft’s cloud-based services. The company said the hacking group it calls Hafnium was able to trick Exchange servers into allowing it to gain access. The hackers then masqueraded as someone who should…

Blithe Spirit An eccentric mystic, Madame Arcati (Judi Dench), holds a séance in the home of bestselling crime novelist Charles (Dan Stevens) in a bid to relieve his writer’s block, but accidentally summons the spirit of fiery Elvira (Leslie Mann), Charles’ deceased first wife. FIVE FACTS: 1. This film is adapted from the 1941 Noël Coward play of the same name. 2. Isla Fisher appears in the film as Charles’ new wife Ruth, who clashes humorously with Elvira. 3. Despite having recently played Madame Arcati in several tours of Blithe Spirit around England, Penelope Keith was not handed the role for this film version. 4. In June 2020, IFC Films acquired the North American distribution rights to this film. 5. The critical response to the movie has been generally negative,…

AT&T is spinning off its DirecTV into a new company for a fraction of the $48.5 billion it paid for the satellite TV service in 2015. DirecTV has lost millions of customers on AT&T’s watch, and is valued in the deal at just $16.25 billion, including debt. Private equity firm TPG will own 30% of the business, while AT&T holds the rest. The telecom company will receive $7.8 billion in cash, including $1.8 billion from TPG and and $5.8 billion from the new DirecTV firm, which is borrowing that sum. The new DirecTV will also take on $200 million in debt from AT&T. AT&T launched its streaming service HBO Max last year and has focused on building that business. It also owns TV networks like CNN and TBS along with…

The Supreme Court seemed likely to find that the judges who oversee patent disputes are not properly appointed, a case important to patent holders and inventors including major technology companies. The question for the justices has to do with more than 250 administrative patent judges who make up the Patent Trial and Appeal Board, which was created by Congress in 2011. The court’s decision could be disruptive to the functioning of the board, which issues hundreds of decisions a year. The justices’ decision could also potentially affect more than 100 other similarly-appointed officials. The case involves the Constitution’s Appointments Clause which lays out how government officials can be appointed. As the size of government has increased, a growing conservative legal movement has objected to unelected officials wielding vast amounts of…

President Joe Biden wants to change the way the U.S. uses energy by expanding renewables, but he will need to navigate a host of challenges — including the coronavirus pandemic and restoring hundreds of thousands of lost jobs — to get it done. The wind and solar industries have managed to grow despite a less-than-supportive Trump administration, which favored fossil fuels such as coal. They have a new ally in the White House in Biden, who has set a goal of 100% renewable energy in the power sector by 2035. Now comes the hard part — making it happen. Disruption from the pandemic has cost the renewable energy industry, which relies heavily on labor, about 450,000 jobs. The pandemic has also made it more difficult to build wind and solar…

Google says it won’t develop new ways to follow individual users across the internet after it phases out existing ad tracking technology from Chrome browsers, in a change that threatens to shake up the online advertising industry. The digital giant has been working on proposals to remove from Chrome so-called third party cookies, which are snippets of code used by a website’s advertisers to record browsing history in order to show users personalized ads. Third-party cookies have long been a key tool for marketers to deliver targeted ads but they’ve also been a source of privacy concerns, so Google has proposed instead grouping together web users with similar interests and keeping web histories private on user devices. Now the company - which will continue to be able to track users…

Zoom’s astronomical growth is tapering off along with the pandemic, raising questions about whether the videoconferencing service’s immense popularity will fade as more people return to classrooms, offices and other places that have been off limits for the past year. The deceleration emerged in an otherwise impressive quarterly earnings report released this week. The stellar results capped a year in which Zoom’s name became synonymous with the way millions of people have been forced to gather in online video panels while being corralled at home. Although Zoom continued to enjoy robust gains from November through January, its subscriber increases were significantly smaller than in each of the previous three quarters that unfolded during pandemic life. Despite that widely anticipated slowdown, both Zoom’s quarterly earnings and revenue easily topped analysts’ projections,…

An artificial intelligence commission led by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt is urging the U.S. to boost its AI skills to counter China, including by pursuing “AI-enabled” weapons – something that Google itself has shied away from on ethical grounds. Schmidt and current executives from Google, Microsoft, Oracle and Amazon are among the 15 members of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, which released its final report to Congress. “To win in AI we need more money, more talent, stronger leadership,” Schmidt said. The report says that machines that can “perceive, decide, and act more quickly” than humans and with more accuracy are going to be deployed for military purposes — with or without the involvement of the U.S. and other democracies. It warns against unchecked use of autonomous…

Life Support Madison Beer It’s been a long road to the Los Angeles-based singer Madison Beer’s debut studio album – and a somewhat treacherous one, too, given her recent mental health problems. “That’s why I called this album Life Support,” she recently explained,“because it kept me alive.” FIVE FACTS: 1. “I had just been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, and I was in and out of a lot of dark mental states,” Beer told NME last year about the time she was making this album. 2. On one of the tracks, “Homesick”, Beer samples adult animation Rick and Morty, which she has described as her “favorite cartoon objectively.” 3. Four singles have been released from the album, starting with “Good in Goodbye” on January 31, 2020 and “Selfish” on February…

San Diego Comic-Con will remain virtual for the July event, but organizers are planning for a smaller-scale gathering later this year. Comic-Con announced that the annual confab will return to virtual for a second-straight year between July 23-25. The in-person experience was canceled again due to coronavirus-related cautions around large gatherings. Organizers said postponements and other challenges caused by the pandemic left them with “limited financial resources.” As a result, the virtual convention in July was reduced from four to three days. However, organizers said they are planning a smaller in-person November event in San Diego. The details have not yet been released. Comic-Con attracts more than 135,000 people — often elaborately costumed — to the Gaslamp District every year for the comic book convention. It is not uncommon for…

In an industrial neighborhood on the outskirts of Bangladesh’s largest city lies a factory with gleaming new equipment imported from Germany, its immaculate hallways lined with hermetically sealed rooms. It is operating at just a quarter of its capacity. It is one of three factories that The Associated Press found on three continents whose owners say they could start producing hundreds of millions of COVID-19 vaccines on short notice if only they had the blueprints and technical know-how. But that knowledge belongs to the large pharmaceutical companies who have produced the first three vaccines authorized by countries including Britain, the European Union and the U.S. — Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca. The factories are all still awaiting responses. Across Africa and Southeast Asia, governments and aid groups, as well as the…

Global energy-related carbon dioxide emissions rose slightly in December compared with the same month of 2019, indicating the sharp drop seen due to the pandemic was short-lived. Figures released this week by the International Energy Agency show emissions from the production and use of oil, gas and coal were 2% higher in December 2020 than a year earlier. The Paris-based intergovernmental agency said a resurgence in economic activity coupled with a lack of clean energy policies mean many countries are now seeing higher emissions than before the coronavirus outbreak. “The rebound in global carbon emissions toward the end of last year is a stark warning that not enough is being done to accelerate clean energy transitions worldwide,” said the agency’s executive director, Fatih Birol. “If governments don’t move quickly with…