Month: January 2021

Is there any series that is not improved by the addition of Sean Bean (aka Ned Stark in the first season of Game of Thrones)? TNT clearly doesn't think so, bringing Bean on board for the second season of Snowpiercer, the television reboot of the critically acclaimed 2013 film by Oscar-winning director Bong Joon-ho (Parasite). Bean will play visionary billionaire Mr. Wilford, who invented an eternal engine that is now driving a massive train filled with survivors around and around the world after an apocalyptic event known as the Freeze.

(Spoilers for S1 below.)

As we've reported previously, Bong's film itself was an adaptation of a 1982 French graphic novel Le Transperceneige, about remnants of humanity trying to survive an ice age inside a 1,001-car train. The train is run by a reclusive transportation magnate named Mr. Wilford, who has separated the passengers according to class and has a nefarious plan to ensure life on the train remains sustainable.

The 2016 film Hidden Figures brought the forgotten Black women who worked at NASA during the Apollo program into the national spotlight. Now PBS is doing the same for Elizebeth Smith Friedman, a Quaker poet who helped pioneer the field of cryptography with her husband, William Friedman, in a new documentary for the American Experience series. The Codebreaker is based on the 2017 book The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America's Enemies by San Francisco Chronicle journalist Jason Fagone. Per the official premise:

The Codebreaker reveals the fascinating story of Elizebeth Smith Friedman, the groundbreaking cryptanalyst whose painstaking work to decode thousands of messages for the U.S. government would send infamous gangsters to prison in the 1920s and bring down a massive, near-invisible Nazi spy ring in WWII. Her remarkable contributions would come to light decades after her death, when secret government files were unsealed. But together with her husband, the legendary cryptologist William Friedman, Elizebeth helped develop the methods that led to the creation of the powerful new science of cryptology and laid the foundation for modern codebreaking today.

Director Chana Gazit told Ars she was drawn to the story for a variety of reasons, including the fact that it has taken so long for Elizebeth Smith Friedman's vital contributions to come to light. "If we missed Elizebeth, who contributed so much in the first half of the 20th century to the safety of this country, who else are we missing?" she said. "It just felt good to be able to portray a brilliant woman with ambition, who wanted a bigger life, who was able to overcome so many obstacles, but also had a rounded life that included the personal as well as the professional."

To learn more about this extraordinary woman, Ars sat down with Fagone, upon whose book the documentary is based.

Enlarge / Pro-Trump protesters break windows of the Capitol building on January 6, 2021. (credit: Lev Radin/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images)

In recent days, Facebook has been waging war on content supportive of last Wednesday's attack on the US Capitol. Last week, Facebook and Instagram indefinitely suspended President Donald Trump's accounts on Facebook and Instagram. Now Facebook says it is banning posts containing the phrase "stop the steal"—a popular rallying cry for people who think the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump.

"We removed the original Stop the Steal group in November and have continued to remove Pages, groups and events that violate any of our policies, including calls for violence," Facebook wrote in a Monday blog post. Facebook says that it has allowed "robust conversations" about the outcome of the 2020 election. However, the company said that it has seen "continued attempts to organize events against the outcome of the US presidential election." Facebook worries that these efforts could "lead to violence."

The action is not automatic. Around 5pm on Monday, I was able to write a Facebook post that said "Does Facebook let me say 'stop the steal?'" Facebook says that "it may take some time to scale up our enforcement of this new step."