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| | Produced by Ross and Matt Duffer, “The Boroughs,” from creators Jeffrey Addiss and Will Matthews, has been described as “Stranger Things” in a retirement home. The new series “takes place in a seemingly picturesque retirement community in the New Mexico desert, where a group of – you guessed it – unlikely heroes must band together to stop an otherworldly threat from stealing the one thing they don’t have: time.” Alfred Molina, Geena Davis, Alfre Woodard, Denis O’Hare, Dee Wallace, Bill Pullman, Clarke Peters and Jena Malone lead the unstoppable cast. |
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| | VARIETY
“I didn’t expect that,” Coogler said as he took the stage to massive applause. Coogler continued: “I come from a community that loves me. They made me believe that I could do this, that I could be a writer. And it was amazing to be accepted into the community of film actors, the community of Los Angeles … For all the writers out there, when y’all look at that blank page, think of who you love, think of anybody who you’ve seen in pain that you identify with and wish they felt better and let that love motivate you.” |
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DEADLINE
Ten U.S. filmmakers have been selected for a new program designed to help bridge the gap for women directors between the independent and studio systems.
The mentorship program comes at a time when the Hollywood gender gap remains a problem. Representation for women in the director’s chair dipped to a seven-year low in 2025, according to a recent USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative study. The number of girls and women leading the top movies of 2025 also hit a seven-year low. |
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| | AARP’s Movies for Grownups initiative puts actors, filmmakers and creatives over 50 at center stage. According to AARP.org, MFG “advocates for the 50-plus audience by fighting ageism in the entertainment industry and encouraging films that resonate with older viewers.” Additionally, they offer a series of screenings across theaters nationwide that highlight classic films, as well as those that appeal to older audiences. In honor of Black History Month, AARP’s Movies for Grownups program honors 10 Black actors over the age of 50 who have pushed limits, put in the work and brought endless joy to viewers on screen. Whether they found fame early in their career or have only recently gotten the recognition they deserve, check out AARP’s full lineup. |
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| | In 1984, during a trip to Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, teacher and textbook author Pleasant T. Rowland was inspired to create a book series that would immerse kids in history using “the very playthings — books and dolls — that girls have always loved.”
“I remember sitting on a bench in the shade, reflecting on what a poor job schools do of teaching history, and how sad it was that more kids couldn’t visit this fabulous classroom of living history.”
So she set out to do just that, fleshing out the three original characters and the concepts for their books in one weekend. With Samantha’s story, readers view upstate New York in the Edwardian era through the eyes of an orphan learning to think for herself — and climbing a tree or two along the way — while being raised by her wealthy grandmother. In Kirsten’s narrative, we’re brought on a Swedish family’s journey as they immigrate to Minnesota and adapt to American life in the 1850s. And in Molly’s tale, we follow a girl in Illinois who learns to become a leader, helping others while her father serves as a doctor in England during World War II. |
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| | THE ATLANTIC
The plight of young men has, for some years now, been a cause of public concern; recently the din of alarm bells seems louder than ever. Men are attending and graduating from college at rates lower than in the past—and lower than women. Large shares of working-age men, especially young ones, are unemployed. |
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| Jarring numbers are dying “deaths of despair,” a term coined by the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton to describe mortality due to suicide, overdose, or alcoholic liver disease. In response, a mini-industry of experts has sought to explain what’s going on: Richard V. Reeves, a social scientist and the author of Of Boys and Men, created the think tank the American Institute for Boys and Men.
With the decline of manufacturing and other male-dominated industries, the rise of “toxic masculinity” critiques, and the difficulty of being a breadwinner when everything costs so much, they argue, young men no longer know how to behave or what to reach for. |
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| | Last fall, a mother discovered why her teenage daughter’s mental health had been deteriorating: It was a result of conversations with a Character.AI chatbot. She’s not alone. Aura’s State of Youth Report, released in December, found that parents believe technology has a more negative effect on girls’ emotions, including stress, jealousy, and loneliness—51% compared with 36% for boys. That’s unacceptable, and we need to do better.
These failures reflect who is building our technology. Women make up just 22% of the AI workforce. When systems are designed without women’s perspectives, they replicate existing inequities and introduce new risks. The pattern is clear. AI is failing girls and women. |
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INSTITUTE OF GLOBAL POLITICS
Child marriage is a violation of girls’ fundamental rights – stripping them of their childhood, education, bodily autonomy, and economic opportunity. |
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| Today, there are 640 million women who were married as children; more than 200 million of those women were married under the age of 15. Each year, 12 million girls are still married before the age of 18. A new report from The Women’s Initiative at Columbia SIPA’s Institute of Global Politics, together with the Center for Global Development, titled “Accelerating Efforts to End Child Marriage,” examines the scale of the crisis, its consequences for girls and their communities, and what it will take to end the practice globally. The foreword is authored by Secretary Hillary Clinton and Sheryl Sandberg. |
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Behind the Lens: The Struggle for Women’s Representation in Oscars® History
Just one woman is nominated for best director at this year’s Oscars: Chloé Zhao for “Hamnet.” This makes her only the 9th female director to be nominated in Oscar history. |
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The first woman to be nominated was Lina Wertmüller for her film “Seven Beauties” in 1977, and it took more than 30 years for a woman to win the award. Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman to win the award in 2010 for “The Hurt Locker.” Although opportunities are expanding, for decades women have faced exclusion, discrimination, and harassment in the entertainment industry, which hampers their access and career potential. Further, research suggests that female directors, alongside directors of color of all genders, face biases in project selection, budgeting, and distribution — limiting their potential for success even when given the opportunity to helm a film. |
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TIME
Saujani is the founder of Moms First—a nonprofit that advocates for mothers, especially through paid leave and affordable childcare—as well as Girls Who Code, a nonprofit that has worked with more than 760,000 students (and raised tens of millions of dollars) to close the gender gap in coding and technology employment. |
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Today, she pinpoints that attention-grabbing moment with Trump as an inflection point leading to major strides for the affordable-childcare movement, including the recent announcement that New York plans to deliver universal care for kids under 5. In January, Saujani stood beside Governor Kathy Hochul and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani as they announced the $1.7 billion investment. |
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| USA TODAY
Bond's background uniquely prepared her to break the proverbial glass ceiling. |
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| “I spent most of my life in positions where I didn't necessarily fit in,” she says. “I'm a woman who has always worked in environments that are male dominated. I've lived in different places around the world. I'm a Black woman, who's often been in spaces where that's not the majority of people there, where most people are White."
“The beautiful thing that I discovered is that gaming is really unique relative to pretty much anything else you can do in the technology industry, and that it does this beautiful blend of art and science,” she said. “There's experiences that people can have in games that they couldn't have otherwise.” |
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The Necessary Foundation has been launched with Alan Cumming, Bowen Yang, Lena Waithe and Adam Goldman as founding board members (Goldman will also serve as executive director) with the purpose of offering financing and other opportunities to help LGBTQ+ filmmakers establish themselves in the entertainment industry.
“Queer filmmakers don’t need permission, but they do need opportunity. That’s what the Necessary Foundation is building. I’m so honored to be a part of supporting new artists at the starting line,” said Yang in a statement. Cumming added, “This really is a crisis. If we don’t act now to support young queer and trans filmmakers, LGBT+ people will disappear from American film and television screens. It’s as simple as that.” |
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| | Happy Women's History Month!
Women's History Month began as National Women's History Week, a local celebration in Santa Rosa, California. In 1980, President Jimmy Carter designated the first National Women's History Week by Presidential Proclamation.
Congress continued to pass resolutions designating Women's History Week for five more years, until 1987, when they established all of March would be celebrated as Women's History Month. |
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