James' World 2

Some content on this page was disabled on April 15, 2025 as a result of a DMCA takedown notice from Guardian Media Group. You can learn more about the DMCA here:

https://wordpress.com/support/copyright-and-the-dmca/

Click the link below the picture

.

The Motion Picture Association (MPA) recently released their annual THEME report for 2021. The report tracks the theatrical and in-home entertainment industry domestically as well as globally and includes trending data from several video industries. For the report, the MPA relied on various data sources.

With studios and movie theaters reopening around the world, the global and U.S. entertainment market rebounded from 2020. With studios reopening in 2021, the number of movies in production grew substantially, although, with the lingering impact from the pandemic, movie attendance remained at less than half of 2019. The number of television programs reached record highs as “peak TV” continues unabated and movie production rebounded. Digital continues to be the fastest-growing segment and a significant revenue driver in the home entertainment market, as viewers and content continue to migrate to streaming platforms. Here are some of the highlights.

Total Entertainment U.S.: For 2021 the entertainment (home and mobile) market, consisting of digital and physical (discs) and theatrical, totaled $36.8 billion in the U.S., a year-over-year increase of 14% and a figure even surpassing the record $36.1 billion in 2019. At $29.5 billion, digital accounted for 80% of all dollars with a year-over-year increase of 19%. Digital has been the fastest-growing sector, since 2014 revenue has nearly doubled twice (from $7.6 billion). Theatrical accounted for 12% and physical the remaining 8%.

.

Sony Pictures’ “Spider-Man: No Way Home” was the highest-grossing film since Avengers: Endgame in … [+]  Getty Images

.

.

Click the link below for the article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

Imagine walking into a party where you know almost no one (pathetic) — a party at which I, a stranger to you (probably), have arrived well before you (sorry). Should this occur in real life, it is inevitable that shortly after your entrance, as you are tentatively probing the scene in search of safe ingress into social traffic, I will yank you, abruptly, into the middle of a conversation. I will turn to you and start talking as if you’d been involved in the discussion for an hour. I will lob questions at you that are tailored so that any answer you give can be right. Soon, you will forget I dragged you into this interaction; your easy popularity will seem, in retrospect, inevitable. You will most likely feel at least vaguely friendly toward me, because I so clearly want to be your friend. And the whole time I am doing this — because, despite your rewritten recollections, I am the one doing all of this — I will be thinking: Oh, my God, I’m doing it again. I hate this. I hate this. Why can’t I stop doing this to people?

Of all my bad habits, it is the ruthless desire to befriend that exerts the strongest pull on my behavior. Not that I want more friends — God, no. If anything, I’d love to drop about 80 percent of the ones I have, so I could stop remembering their birthdays. But because I can’t quit — because constantly pulling strangers into my orbit is what stabilizes my bearing in the universe — I have determined to double down. And so, in January, I booked a package vacation to Morocco through a company whose stated aim — beyond offering package vacations — is to help people in their 30s and 40s make new friends.

.

Rosie Marks for The New York Times

.

.

Click the link below for the article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

When Nisar Ahmad Wani succeeded in carrying out the world’s first camel cloning in 2009, it was hailed as a great achievement. Today, Wani is scientific director at the Reproductive Biotechnology Centre, in Dubai, and the practice is so popular that cloning has become his nine-to-five job.

Wani and his team research and develop new cloning techniques and maintain cell banks, allowing them to make copies of animals including buffalo and sheep. But the center’s focus is on cloning camels.

Each year, it produces dozens of cloned dromedary camel calves. Among the most popular are copies of camel “beauty queens,” with the right combination of drooping lips and long necks.

Replicating beauties

Camel beauty pageants are popular in the Gulf states and prize money runs into the tens of millions of dollars at some events. Owners have been disqualified in the past for using banned techniques such as injecting camels with silicone and fillers and inflating body parts using rubber bands to enhance their appearance. But as far as these competitions are concerned, cloned camels are perfectly legitimate.

.

.

.

Click the link below for the article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

.

.

.

Click the link below for the article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

In my 20s, I had a friend who was brilliant, charming, Ivy-educated, and rich, heir to a family fortune. I’ll call him Gallagher. He could do anything he wanted. He experimented, dabbling in neuroscience, law, philosophy, and other fields. But he was so critical, so picky, that he never settled on a career. Nothing was good enough for him. He never found love for the same reason. He also disparaged his friends’ choices, so much so that he alienated us. He ended up bitter and alone. At least that’s my guess. I haven’t spoken to Gallagher in decades.

There is such a thing as being too picky, especially when it comes to things like work, love, and nourishment (even the pickiest eater has to eat something). That’s the lesson I gleaned from Gallagher. But when it comes to answers to big mysteries, most of us aren’t picky enough. We settle on answers for bad reasons, for example, because our parents, priests, or professors believe it. We think we need to believe something, but actually, we don’t. We can, and should, decide that no answers are good enough. We should be agnostics.

Some people confuse agnosticism (not knowing) with apathy (not caring). Take Francis Collins, a geneticist who directs the National Institutes of Health. He is a devout Christian, who believes that Jesus performed miracles, died for our sins, and rose from the dead. In his 2006 bestseller The Language of God, Collins calls agnosticism a “cop-out.” When I interviewed him, I told him I am an agnostic and objected to “cop-out.”

.

Photo by gremlin/Getty Images

.

.

Click the link below for the article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

Scientists have a firm grasp on the purpose of certain automatic physical functions, like blinking, breathing, or digestion. When it comes to sleep, however, researchers still aren’t clear on why exactly your body needs to shut off every night. Details aside, one thing’s for sure: When you don’t sleep, your body revolts.

The effects of acute sleep deprivation—which is more akin to pulling an all-nighter than to getting just a few hours of sleep every night for weeks at a time (that’s chronic sleep deprivation)—generally kick in after 16 to 18 hours of being awake and get progressively worse with each proceeding hour. Your mind, heart, endocrine system, and immune system are all affected, malfunctioning in ways both subtle and severe.

The consequences of chronic sleep deprivation are far worse than one sleepless night. But the decision to pull an all-nighter just once can leave some serious damage in its wake.

Mind

When it comes to the effects of acute sleep deprivation, “It’s really all about the brain,” says Steven Feinsilver, director of sleep medicine at Lenox Hill Hospital and a leading sleep researcher. The first signal that your body is overtired will be a sluggish mind. Your reaction time will begin lagging around hour 18; after a full night without sleep, it will nearly triple—which, for context, is about the same as being legally drunk. Your ability to form memories will start deteriorating, and after a while, your capacity to create any new memories at all will shut off entirely.

.

Photo: Bill Butcher

.

.

Click the link below for the article:

.

__________________________________________