Lengthy television viewing in adolescence may raise the risk for depression in young adulthood, according to a new report.
The study, in the February issue of The Archives of General Psychiatry, published by the American Medical Association, found a rising risk of depressive symptoms with increasing hours spent watching television.
There was no association of depression with exposure to computer games, videocassettes or radio.
Sunday’s Super Bowl kept the officials scrambling to review hard-to-call plays on the field, so maybe it’s no surprise that the TV ratings needed a thorough look too.
After examining the numbers more closely, Nielsen Media Research said Tuesday that NBC’s game actually delivered an average of 98.7 million total viewers, making it the most-watched Super Bowl ever and the No. 2 telecast of all time, behind only the 1983 series finale of “MASH” with 106 million.
It isn’t about cows or cobras, a wedding or outsourcing. It isn’t about gurus or Gandhi. “Slumdog Millionaire,” in fact, may be the first world-traveling film about India in a generation to discard the old, smudged lenses for seeing this country.
Its novelty has given it a dream run in U.S. movie theaters, and last week it won best dramatic picture at the Golden Globe Awards in Los Angeles. It now is given a good shot at the Academy Awards next month, even though much of the dialogue is in Hindi.
But the film’s freshness lies not just in how the West sees India. It lies, too, in how Indians see themselves. It portrays a changing India, with great realism, as something India long resisted being: a land of self-makers, where a scruffy son of the slums can hoist himself up, flout his origins, break with fate.
A VICAR has complained after a TV crew covered up a cross while filming a church wedding for the Coronation Street soap opera.
[Steve’s marriage] occupies most of the film’s first hour and sets out in rich detail what I take to be one of the movie’s principal concerns ”” what happens to Americans when their rituals have become only quaint reminders of the past rather than life-ordering rules of the present.
Listen to it all. This interview is about 9 1/2 minuteslong and says so much about our society and what we value right now. Take the time to listen to it all and do not miss all the incoherence in her remarks.
There were two overarching reasons for condemning the suburbs, during the ’50s and early ’60s, as the most rotten locale in civilized life: class and money. Most of the people leaving the cities for the suburbs in the 1950s were tradespeople, modest businessmen, teachers and the like. They were, in other words, members of the middle-class, the impassioned rejection of which has been the chief rite de passage of the modern American artist and intellectual. With the growth of suburban towns, the liberal American intellectual now had a concrete geography to house his acute sense of outrage.
Yet if the suburbs were becoming the headquarters of the American middle-class, they were also becoming associated with the enviable characteristics of upward mobility: a decent salary, home ownership, access to superior public education and services. “We’re going to have to move back to the city,” the callous but suddenly redeemed advertising man grimly says to his wife after quitting his job in disgust in the popular 1959 film “The Last Angry Man” — moving from suburban Connecticut to hardscrabble Manhattan being proof of his redemption. (What a socioeconomic difference 50 years makes!)
Art and intellect are solitary vocations, and their practitioners often require a common enemy to sustain the lonely effort. The suburbs continued to serve that purpose, but the type of antipathy toward them changed in the late ’60s and ’70s.
As Ahmad al-Shugairi took the stage, dressed in a flowing white gown and headdress, he clutched a microphone and told his audience that he had no religious training or titles: “I am not a sheik.”
But over the next two hours, he worked the crowd as masterfully as any preacher, drawing rounds of uproarious laughter and, as he recalled the Prophet Muhammad’s death, silent tears. He spoke against sectarianism. He made pleas for women to be treated as equals. He talked about his own life ”” his seven wild years in California, his divorce, his children ”” and gently satirized Arab mores.
When he finished, the packed concert hall erupted in a wild standing ovation. Members of his entourage soon bundled him through the thick crowd of admirers to a back door, where they rushed through the darkness to a waiting car.
“Elvis has left the building,” Mr. Shugairi joked, in English, as he relaxed into his seat.
Elizabeth and I went last night. Enjoyed it. A thought provoking story, and well acted, especially by the two leads–KSH.
When Baby Boomers think back to the influence TV had on their childhoods, they probably recall an ugly, rabbit-eared set perched in the corner of the living room that picked up a handful of channels. If their parents heard anything objectionable on the “boob tube,” they’d turn the channel or hit the off button.
Things have changed, and not necessarily for the better. Today’s mass media penetrate deeply and quietly, inflicting real damage on young children, an increasing body of research shows. Moms and dads today are less likely to witness what their children are watching and hearing, and less able to monitor it.
More than 170 studies going back over 28 years have concluded that heavy media exposure ”” everything from TV to cellphones to computer games ”” increases the risk of adolescent obesity, smoking, sex, drug and alcohol use, attention problems and poor grades, according to a report released this week by Common Sense Media (CSM), a non-profit child advocacy group.
A top Roman Catholic cleric in England has accused Disney of corrupting children, encouraging greed and turning its make-believe world into a latter-day pilgrimage site.
Christopher Jamison, the abbot of Worth Abbey, in southern England, charges Disney with “exploiting spirituality” and helping to generate a culture of materialism while pretending to provide movie, book and theme park stories with a moral message.
Jamison, the star of a British Broadcasting Corp. television series, The Monastery, and a candidate to succeed Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor as leader of the Catholic population of England and Wales, lodged the accusations in his new book, Finding Happiness.
A website launched Friday with the backing of technology industry and Hollywood elite urges people worldwide to help craft a framework for harmony between all religions.
The Charter for Compassion project on the Internet at www.charterforcompassion.org springs from a “wish” granted this year to religious scholar Karen Armstrong at a premier Technology, Entertainment and Design (TED) conference in California.
“Tedizens” include Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin along with other Internet icons as well as celebrities such as Forest Whittaker and Cameron Diaz.
Happy-Go-Lucky starring Sally Hawkins. Elizabeth and I saw it last night. Terriific. Ideal for adult small groups to go see and discuss, or for you to go to with friends and discuss. Thought-provoking, moving, funny and touching. Put it on your list–KSH.
The study is the first to draw a direct link between sexual content on TV and the likelihood that teens who watch it will become parents. Researchers examined survey data from about 2,000 teens. They plucked out 23 popular shows and asked how much teens watched each. They coded the replies to established indicators of sexual content for each show ”” everything from nudge-nudge jokes on network sitcoms to full-blown intercourse on steamy cable dramas.
What they found: By age 16, teens who watched a lot of sexually charged TV were more than twice as likely to be pregnant or father an out-of-wedlock baby as teens who watched very little: 12% vs. 5%. The gap holds steady through age 20. Researchers controlled for parents’ race, income and education and teens’ total TV time.
Previous studies have linked sex on TV to earlier initiation of sex; this is the first to link TV sex to pregnancy.
“I don’t find it surprising,” says Jane Brown, who studies media and adolescent health at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill….
The longtime private secretary of the late Pope John Paul II revealed in a film screened Thursday that the pope was lightly wounded in a 1982 knife attack by a priest in Portugal.
Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz made the revelation in “Testimony,” a movie on John Paul’s life that was screened for Pope Benedict XVI and top clergy at the Vatican.
It was known that John Paul was assaulted by a knife-wielding Spanish priest while visiting the shrine of Fatima in Portugal to give thanks for surviving an assassination attempt. He when he was shot by a Turkish gunman in St. Peter’s Square in 1981.
“Today I can say what up to now we have kept secret,” Dziwisz said in the movie. “That priest wounded the Holy Father.”
America is stitched together by words, ideas and memory, according to America’s best-known documentary filmmaker.
“We are still stitched together by words and most importantly, by their dangerous progeny””ideas,” Ken Burns told a packed Massey Performing Arts Center Tuesday night at Belmont University in Nashville, Tenn.
Burns has been America’s chief documentarian for the past three decades. His extensive films on the Civil War, baseball, jazz and, most recently, World War II have built a reputation that once prompted historian Stephen Ambrose to say, “More Americans get their history from Ken Burns than any other source.”
In “Flash of Genius,” Greg Kinnear plays Robert Kearns, a professor who invented intermittent windshield wipers. Based on a true story, Kearns claimed that Detroit automakers stole his idea and sued them in a long, drawn-out battle. Host Liane Hansen chats with Kinnear about his movie.
Ten-time Oscar nominee Paul Newman, creator of iconic movie anti-heroes in “The Hustler,” “Cool Hand Luke” and “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” has died after a battle with cancer.
The 83-year-old screen legend with the piercing blue eyes died Friday at his farmhouse near Westport, Conn., said publicist Jeff Sanderson. He was surrounded by his family and close friends.
Researchers have long known that watching violence on TV or in movies ratchets up aggression, but what about watching people being mean to one another? Could watching Mean Girls make you as aggressive as watching Kill Bill?
A new study suggests the answer is yes.
Brigham Young University professor Sarah Coyne and colleagues asked 53 British college-aged women to watch one of three video clips, featuring either physical aggression (a knife fight from Kill Bill), relational aggression (a montage from Mean Girls) or no aggression (a séance scene from the horror movie What Lies Beneath). They then filled out a brief questionnaire and were allowed to leave the room. Right outside was another researcher who asked if they would like to participate in a study involving reaction times.
Was Alfred Hitchcock a sexual monster? Or was he, as the French film makers Rohmer and Chabrol once claimed, a moralist whose films are steeped in Roman Catholic themes?
Whatever his achievement as an artist, the personal reputation of Alfred Hitchcock remains the subject of heated dispute. Glance at biographies of the British director and two wildly differing Hitchcocks emerge. Donald Spoto’s highly readable The Dark Side of Genius: the Life of Alfred Hitchcock portrays a frustrated lecher who delights in torturing his leading blondes. Yet in Patrick McGilligan’s later, authoritative, 818-page Alfred Hitchcock: a Life in Darkness and Light, Hitchcock appears as an iconoclastic if ultimately devout Roman Catholic whose entire oeuvre is “suffused” with a profound Catholicism.
“His Catholicism is overt on a superficial and a profound level” McGilligan claims. “On a superficial level, he is irreverent: think, for example, of the false nun with high heels in The Lady Vanishes. On a profound level, the Catholicism is conscious. A constant theme in the Hitchcock film is the wrong person being caught by the police, and convicted. The police in his movies are often stupid, and Hitchcock was not prepared ”“ with the exception of The Paradine Case (1947) – to let his victims go to court. Often they precipitate their own demise. Hitchcock was strongly opposed to capital punishment and his films question the infallibility of earthly justice as opposed to God’s justice.”
Did life imitate art when David Duchovny, who plays a sex-mad writer on the hit US TV show “Californication,” seek treatment for sex addiction?
Or was it case of art imitating life for the “X-Files” actor — regarded as one of the hottest men in Hollywood and whose off-screen romances have long been a talking point.
Duchovny’s announcement on Thursday that he was voluntarily going into rehab for sex addiction after years of denying he had a problem, threw a spotlight on a disorder that few celebrities, and even fewer ordinary men and women, admit to.
Often likened to alcoholism, drug addiction or gambling, sex addiction is a form of compulsive behavior which is sending growing numbers of people into therapy but which is not formally recognized as a “diagnosable disorder” by the American Psychiatric Association.
On Sept. 2, as many as 750 pastors and church workers are expected to crowd into the sanctuary at Calvary Church in south Charlotte, some of them driving in from as far as 60 miles away.
They’re coming not to sing, pray or hear sermons, but to watch a movie.
“Billy: The Early Years,” the new feature film about Charlotte-born Billy Graham, won’t hit theaters until Oct. 10. But the movie’s producers, based in California and England, are hoping to build some buzz in the coming weeks by holding more than 50 such sneak peeks for evangelical “opinion makers” across the Bible Belt.
In South Carolina, advance screenings are scheduled for Columbia, Conway, Greenville and Spartanburg, according to the movie Web site www.advancefilmscreenings.com. The site states that Charleston is one of five South Carolina “opening cities” in which the movie will be shown beginning Oct. 10; the others are Greenville, Columbia, Myrtle Beach and Florence. Specific theaters are not listed.
Good reviews from critics are nice, but the thumbs-up producers of Christian films want most these days are from pastors urging their flocks to head for the theater.
Studios including Universal, 20th Century Fox and Pathé are failing to include details of the explicit content of films or their age classification on posters and publicity material.
The British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) has sent a warning to the studios reminding them of their obligation.
Its guidelines require that all films which carry the U, PG, 12A, 15 and 18 certificates must display their classification and warnings about sexual or violent content on all promotional material, including trailers.
But inquiries by the BBFC and The Sunday Telegraph have found several new releases being advertised on billboards and in magazines either without their certificate or the warnings, or both.
Mr. Cosby’s appearance in the predominantly black neighborhood was to encourage residents to enroll in Baltimore City Community College. During a nearly hour-long speech, Mr. Cosby said it’s never too late for high school dropouts to improve.
“There’s no love out there,” Mr. Cosby said of the street life. “The only thing out there is how to write your entrance exam to jail. We’ve got to teach. The church is open. Go on in.”
Mr. Cosby has been the source of controversy when he has addressed mostly black audiences. His criticisms of men fathering children out of wedlock have been called divisive. He spent most of his Baltimore speech, however, imploring his audience to seek self-improvement and to build pride within their community.
Young people of St. Ambrose said Mr. Cosby’s message of hope at St. Ambrose could be a catalyst for change.
“It means a lot for someone that popular,” said Maulana Waters, 15, “to come out and speak to regular people like us.”
(Note: the original thread to which this responds is here. For purposes of clarity I am going to request that any further comments on this thread and that one be made THERE. Anyone wishing to contact Bishop Wright directly please email me off blog and I will forward it to him–KSH).
I confess I had not heard of Colbert and his remarkable show until Harper managed to get me on to it. Since I have always believed in General Booth’s principle that ‘if I could win one more soul to the Lord by playing the tambourine with my toes, I’d do it’, I figured that if I could tell a million youngish people that because of Jesus’ resurrection God will make a new world and that this begins even now… that would be a really good thing to do… Plus, I’ve always enjoyed a challenge of this sort and it seems to me that it doesn’t hurt for the church to be seen to be engaging with popular culture…
So I was surprised at the wonderful puritanism of Chris Hathaway, to be honest. Colbert isn’t deceiving; he spoke to me before the show and told me (what I’d already been told by others) how his ‘role’ works. Perhaps Chris doesn’t like Colbert’s political stance? Certainly it has been said often enough (by Americans) that America is a land with an irony deficiency, and Colbert is doing his best to put that right. There CAN be honest dialogue, as I think I demonstrated. Albeit briefly. The fact that Chris H hates Candid Camera and finds Sasha Baron Cohen as ‘vile’ speaks for itself. To each their own: I wouldn’t watch those myself, but that’s because I don’t see a whole lot of TV at all.
To The Gordian (it would be so nice to know who you really are!): my poor, crowded diocese sees a great deal of me but they know that Bishops of Durham are supposed to be ‘out there’ taking every opportunity to get the word out. And actually I don’t think I’m thin-skinned; I take a huge amount of heat from a large number of people on several fronts all the time, and only VERY rarely do I respond (as now, more from amusement than anything). Thus, I wasn’t going to bother responding to John Piper’s critique of me in his recent book until I saw that some people were saying ‘there, Wright is wrong, Piper says so, that settles it’. Piper says some interesting things but he hasn’t understood what I’m saying so his critique misses the mark. Ditto with the First Things piece: Neuhaus is very influential and his piece was just flat wrong on several counts, and the only way to get the point across was to nail it fairly thoroughly. Of course, the tactic ‘You shouldn’t be defending yourself — you’re too thin-skinned’ is what every bully that ever lived has said. But The Gordian, I’m sure, isn’t a bully, since he also accuses me of not engaging with my critics sufficiently. Hmmm. I have to engage with them but not defend myself. Tricky. I wonder how much scholarly encounter The Gordian has actually witnessed. Try taking on Ed Sanders, for instance.
And as for a personal or political agenda, ‘wanting to be the standard bearer for evangelical scholarship and the ecclesiastical leader of evangelical Anglicans’: little do you know. My aim is to expound the New Testament and get its message into the bloodstream of the church and out in the mission of the kingdom. And as far as I’m concerned if the church wants me to do a job (like my present one) I’ll give it my best shot, but I’m getting on in years and looking forward to retirement . . .
Actually, I’m not sure how careful a reader The Gordian is (what a pity (s)he doesn’t say who (s)he is!) because (s)he says that in writing against ‘Pierced for Our Transgressions’ (which, by the way, IVP USA refused to publish for more or less the same reasons as I gave in my critique; go figure) I completely ignored the fact that I had commended Steve Chalke’s book — whereas I wrote a whole section on Chalke and all that. It’s interesting, in short, that The Gordian seems to have a catalogue of NTW’s errors which come tumbling out all because I appeared on the Colbert Report . . . Hey, Gordian, why don’t you write me some time, say it all straight out and sign your own name? I’m a human being too, often wrong, sometimes right, always enjoy a good conversation
To Driver8 let me say, If you can find one single place where I have referred to America, even in jest, as ‘the great Satan’, I will pay $250 to a charity of your choice. If you can’t, how about you return the compliment? It isn’t language I use, or have used, so far as I know. Of course, I might have said ‘Some militant Muslims think of America as “the great Satan”,’ but that obviously wouldn’t count. OK?
Warm greetings to one and all. I VERY SELDOM even LOOK at blog sites let alone respond but once in a while it can be fun. I love America! Please pray both for GAFCON and for Lambeth and for all that is swirling around us all just now…
(The Rt. Rev. Dr.) N. T. [“Tom”] Wright is Bishop of Durham
“People are shocked to hear that I think of the Godfather series with sadness. I see those films almost as a personal failure. They changed my life detrimentally, even though the world treated them as big commercial successes. Their success led me to make big commercial films ”“ when what I really wanted was to do original and creative films like those that Woody Allen was able to focus on.”
–Francis Ford Coppola