Day: February 17, 2020

Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest person, has made the second largest charitable gift in recent history.

The Amazon founder is giving $10 billion to a new initiative that will fund programs to combat the effects of climate change, he said in an Instagram post on Monday. The Bezos Earth Fund comes after years of criticism that the billionaire was not doing enough charitable work with his extraordinary wealth, pressure that he has begun to cede to in recent years.

Details are scarce about how exactly this fund will be structured and the exact type of work that it will fund. …

In July 2018 (when we first published this piece), there was a minor uproar when Kardashian scion Kylie Jenner, who is all of 22, appeared on the cover of Forbes’s 60 richest self-made women issue. As many people pointed out, Jenner’s success would have been impossible if she hadn’t been born white, healthy, rich, and famous. She built a successful cosmetics company — now valued at $900 million, according to Forbes — not just with hard work but on a towering foundation of good luck.

Around the same time, there was another minor uproar when Refinery29 published “A …

Despite Birds of Prey, Warner Bros.’s Harley Quinn spinoff, earning great reviews, and despite making an estimated $81 million worldwide in its opening weekend, the film has already been labeled a commercial disappointment in the DC Expanded Universe canon.

But the silly thing is that, because of how rare women-fronted superhero movies are, Birds of Prey’s disappointment is a bigger deal to fans looking for more representation in their superhero movies.

Thanks to the glut of male superhero-led movies, that Thor movie you didn’t see and the beleaguered Justice League are easier to write off as flash-in-the-pan flops …

“Are you in the newsroom? I’m hearing there was a shooting. I can’t get ahold of anyone.” I heard the catch in his voice the same moment I saw dozens of police cars tearing toward Annapolis in the breakdown lane.

The call was from my editor Rick Hutzell on June 28, 2018, the day a man fired a shotgun through the glass doors of the Capital Gazette newsroom. He killed five of my colleagues and friends: Rebecca Smith, Wendi Winters, Gerald Fischman, Rob Hiassen, and John McNamara. Two more were injured.

That morning, I had driven to the United States …