Twitter Inc., after laying off roughly half the company on Friday following Elon Musk’s $44 billion acquisition, is now reaching out to dozens of employees who lost their jobs and asking them to return.
Some of those who are being asked to return were laid off by mistake, according to two people familiar with the moves. Others were let go before management realized that their work and experience may be necessary to build the new features Musk envisions, the people said, asking not to be identified discussing private information.
Twitter cut close to 3,700 people this week via email as a way to trim costs following Musk’s acquisition, which closed in late October. Many employees learned they lost their job after their access to company-wide systems, like email and Slack, were suddenly suspended. The requests for employees to return demonstrate how rushed and chaotic the process was.
A Twitter spokesperson did not reply to a request for comment. Twitter’s plan to hire back workers was previously reported by Platformer.
“Regarding Twitter’s reduction in force, unfortunately there is no choice when the company is losing over $4M/day,” Musk tweeted on Friday.
Twitter has close to 3,700 employees remaining, according to people familiar with the matter. Musk is pushing those who remain at the company to move quickly in shipping new features, and in some cases, employees have even slept at the office to meet new deadlines.
Over the weekend, Twitter rolled out a new Twitter Blue subscription plan, offering a verification check mark for any user who pays $8 a month. The company also said it will soon be launching other features, including half the ads, the ability to post longer videos and get priority ranking in replies, mentions and searches.
The New York Times on Sunday reported Twitter will delay changes to the check marks until after Tuesday’s midterm elections, after users and employees raised concerns that the plan could be misused to sow discord.
The Warner Bros. logo has always been more irreverent than the marks of other major media brands. Think of Bugs Bunny, one hand leaning against the edge of the shield, the other holding a half-eaten carrot. Or similarly posed Michigan J. Frog, the top-hatted mascot of defunct teen television channel the WB.
Unlike say Disney, which is undeniably a family brand, Warner Bros. has always had many audiences and identities. It has more flex. And now, after WarnerMedia’s freshly sealed merger with Discovery, the newly formed Warner Bros. Discovery brand is drawing on that storied, multifaceted visual identity from the past to launch itself into the future.
“We think of Warner Bros. as legendary, iconic, historic,” says Sagi Haviv, partner and designer at Chermayeff & Geismar & Haviv, whose firm started working on branding the as-yet-unformed media giant in early October. On April 8, AT&T formally handed over WarnerMedia’s assets to Discovery, creating Warner Bros. Discovery in a massive $43 billion merger. The company combines WarnerMedia’s assets (a 99-year-old movie studio, as well as television brands like CNN and HBO) with Discovery’s (including HGTV, Food Network, and TLC). And the new logo pairs the company’s lengthy new name with a sharp, flat design take on the classic WB shield.
The new logo follows a leaked mock-up logo from an internal presentation that was widely ridiculed online in June. That logo, one part Superman, one part WordArt, with a dash of movie magic, was a visual representation to accompany the announcement of the proposed merger, not a bona fide mark. (The tagline “The stuff that dreams are made of” is the last line delivered by Humphrey Bogart’s character in the 1941 noir The Maltese Falcon.) Chermayeff & Geismar & Haviv was not involved with it.
One can, perhaps, forgive Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav, formerly head of Discovery, for leaning into that cinematic urge. After all, AT&T bought Warner Bros. in 2018 as part of the Texas-based telecom’s acquisition of parent company TimeWarner, then “slashed and burned through the Warner Bros. ranks and . . . pushed Warner to start behaving as more of a technology company and less of an entertainment one,” as The New York Times reported. The logo got a similar treatment: It was stripped of its iconic gold color and dipped in AT&T’s blue and white.
As Warner Bros. Discovery, the company is embracing its entertainment roots once again and has the logo to match. The shield is back in its full blue-and-gold glory.
Warner Bros. Discovery could have gone with a more abstract visual identity to appear consistent with competing media giants like Amazon and Netflix (not to mention Disney, whose logo has been simplified dramatically over the years). But this new mark isn’t meant to make Warner Bros. Discovery fit in.
“What is a logo meant to do? It’s meant to set you apart, differentiate you. You don’t want to be like others, so that’s one thing,” Haviv says. “The other thing is, they are not like those others. They are storytellers, and the Warner Brothers brand really stands for that and that is why this was selected to be the banner.”
In other words, by embracing—even flaunting—its legacy as an entertainment company above all else, Warner Bros. Discovery hopes that it will be able to better compete against other media brands in the streaming world and beyond. The shield has played before hundreds of iconic movies and TV shows of the past century. It reminds audiences that the company’s library includes not just breadth of content, but depth.
Still, Haviv says that strategy-wise, the design team was careful “not to capture nostalgia alone.” The inspiration for this new logo comes from the 1948 WB shield—a gold, three-dimensional shape that first appeared (in black and white) in the opening credits of Key Largo, another Bogart-starring noir classic. It could easily look antiquated.
So the designers took pains to nudge the overall look in a modern direction. Creating more symmetry between the letters was one such tweak. Without the ribbon of text across the middle traditionally usually used in the shield, the size difference between W and B is more obvious. Filling that space made it look more like a cohesive interpretation rather than a direct translation. But a W is wide and a B is more of a standard width, so giving them equal space inside the shape involved redrawing the swoop of the B to fill the gap in the upper right corner.
The second challenge was equalizing the weight of the border with the weight of the letters so that everything appears as a single unit. That harmony, Haviv says, is what makes it feel “more contemporary, more of today and tomorrow.” One can imagine a form like that easily scaling down to a favicon while still looking at home on a movie poster.
It takes a lot of time, money, and exposure to build meaning into a logo, Haviv says, but the Warner Bros. shield already comes with that time-worn weight. So while the idea of borrowing a symbol from the past for a future-oriented company may seem counterintuitive, the choice was deliberate, and the execution nuanced. The shield is proportioned to be small, Haviv says, “like a jewel,” compared to the main story, which “is more the word, the name.”
Despite the complexity that comes from creating a visual identity in the middle of a major corporate merger, Haviv says that the leadership at Warner Bros, Discovery, especially Zaslav, had a lot of vision. Creativity, storytelling, longevity . . . “all of these qualities are built already into that shield,” Haviv says, “and you can’t buy that.”
As we step into the last days of the year, PANTONE is looking forward to 2022 with its annual Color of the Year. For the year ahead, the global color authority has chosen the shade ‘Very Peri’: a periwinkle blue that inspires calm but is vivified by a violet red undertone.
Instead of dipping into its existing database of hues, this is the first time the company has created a brand-new shade. The team blended the constancy of blue with the excitement of red, resulting in a blue hue that’s both carefree yet empowering.
“Creating a new color for the first time in the history of our PANTONE Color of the Year educational color program reflects the global innovation and transformation taking place,” said Laurie Pressman, Vice President of the PANTONE Color Institute.
“As society continues to recognize color as a critical form of communication and as a way to express and affect ideas and emotions and engage and connect, the complexity of this new red-violet-infused blue hue highlights the expansive possibilities that lie before us.”
While society emerges from a prolonged period of isolation, Very Peri represents the transformative times we’re living in, with our notions of daily living changing, and our physical and digital lives becoming more intertwined.
The “happiest and warmest of all blue hues” illustrates the complexity and fusion of modern life together with an “empowering mix of newness.”
“The selection of PANTONE 17-3938 Very Peri brings a novel perspective and vision of the trusted and beloved blue color family,” explained Leatrice Eiseman, Executive Director of the PANTONE Color Institute.
“Encompassing the qualities of blues, yet at the same time possessing a violet-red undertone, PANTONE 17-3938 Very Peri displays a spritely, joyous attitude and dynamic presence that encourages courages creativity and imaginative expression.”
It’s literally been waving at people but they didn’t pay heed. The blue in the French flag is now navy, reverting to the shade used before 1976 to remember the Revolution.
The exterior of the Elysée Palace, along with other presidential buildings, has been sporting the look for a year unannounced. The refresh was only made public with the publication of the book Elysée Confidentiel by journalists Eliot Blondet and Paul Larrouturou in mid-September, which recounts how the color had been so abruptly swapped, euronews reports.
Arnaud Jolens, the Elysée’s director of operations, had walked into President Emmanuel Macron’s office on the eve of the country’s National Day in 2020 bringing two variations of the flag—the post-1976 version and this one—and then declared: “By the way, I’m changing the flags on all the buildings of the presidency tomorrow.” Macron smiled.
Navy blue honors “the imagination of the Volunteers of Year II, the Poilus of 1914 and the Compagnons de la Libération of Free France,” the French Presidency details. The Volunteers of Year II were France’s first citizen army who, in 1791, volunteered to protect French territory from a threatened Prussian/Austrian invasion post-Revolution (hence the term “Year II.”)
This was the shade of the tri-colored flag up to 45 years before, and the same one flown under the Arc de Triomphe every year on Armistice Day on November 11.
The blue was later brightened to match the one in the European Union flag, a decision made by former president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing.
Decades after, the French presidency has readopted the classic navy. The switch of flags across presidential landmarks cost €5,000.
Macron was evidently pleased by the decision. “The flag that all the presidents have been dragging around since [1976] was not the real French flag,” the book explains, describing the details of the conversation between Macron and Jolens.
Huntington Beach police are preparing for a rally Sunday, April 11, that’s among others promoted on social media across the nation to “unify White people against white hate.”
Things could get heated, however. The local Black Lives Matter chapter has announced on social media that it will hold a counterprotest at 11 a.m. Sunday at the pier. The “white lives matter” rally is advertised for 1 p.m. Sunday at the pier.
In a statement, the BLM chapter’s leader, Tory Johnson, said the counterprotest will be a demonstration against racism and hate.
“White supremacy is not welcome here and we will do everything possible to prevent this rally and defend our community from racist terrorism,” he said.
Troubling history
Huntington Beach has a history of attracting those who promote white supremacy. The city also has a history of rallies turning violent. In March 2017, a rally in support of then-President Trump turned into a brawl between supporters of the president and counterprotestors.
More recently, neighborhoods in Southern California cities including Costa Mesa, Newport Beach, Huntington Beach, Villa Park and Long Beach have been hit with flyers mentioning the Ku Klux Klan, promoting white supremacist ideology as well as Sunday’s rally, and extensively using the phrase “white lives matter.”
Meanwhile, the Huntington Beach City Council voted this week to condemn violence and hate crimes against Asian Americans and to condemn white supremacy. Another action called for city-sponsored events to counter the planned “white lives matter” rally on Sunday. Those events are scheduled to be held April 18 at Central Park.
OC Human Relations will hold a virtual event at the same time as the “white lives matter” rally to give community members a space and opportunity to discuss issues around race, hate and bigotry, said Alison Edwards, the organization’s CEO.
“The idea that working toward equality means that someone else needs to be disadvantaged is just a way of spreading fear,” she added. “This is not a time to be divisive. We all need to work in solidarity.”
Is ‘white lives matter’ a group?
According to the Anti-Defamation League, the phrase “white lives matter” originated in early 2015 as a racist response to the Black Lives Matter movement, which emerged in response to police brutality against Black people.
“White lives matter” appears to be a phrase rather than the name of a specific group, said Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at Cal State San Bernardino.
“That’s not to say there is no cell of individuals or a small group that decided to form a little group by that name,” he said. “We just don’t know. These types of catch phrases and bumper sticker slogans are typically used by a broader sub-culture rather than an organized group.”
Harbinger of things to come?
Levin said his center is closely monitoring the rallies promoted for Sunday in six or seven major cities in the United States, including Huntington Beach.
“If there is a city this Sunday for law enforcement to be ready in Southern California, Huntington Beach would be the place,” he said. He noted Sunday’s rallies appear to be the first time far-right groups or individuals have attempted to organize in this manner since the Capitol riot on Jan. 6.
Around the country, there have been reports of other cities gearing up for rallies on Sunday as well. According to the Statehouse News Bureau, an Ohio news outlet, law enforcement agencies in Columbus, Ohio, are preparing for a planned and publicized “white lives matter” rally at the Ohio Statehouse. Other rallies are being promoted in cities in the Carolinas as well, according to posts on Telegram.
Levin said he expects to see more activity among far-right groups as COVID-19 protocols ease. But, he said, they’ll likely stay local or regional and tend to operate as loners or small cells.
“They are moving into more encrypted platforms,” he said of far-right groups. “We see more regional activity as we see groups of people who feel politically disenfranchised. Organized groups are continuing to exist and exert influence even though the leadership is tumbling. In the far-right, white-supremacist world, leaderless resistance and regional action is the fallback.”
So, could Sunday’s event be a forerunner of things to come or might it fizzle out at a national level?
“I think there is going to be some fizzle, drizzle and thunder,” Levin said, “but mostly fizzle and drizzle.”
After 105 years, the Ohio-based baseball team is changing its name, which has been criticized for being racist, the team confirmed in a statement provided to PEOPLE.
“In our statement in June 2020, we acknowledged the importance of taking a leadership role in diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts across the community and enhancing our support for underserved and under-represented groups,” the statement said. “As part of that commitment, we heard from individuals and groups who shared a variety of views and opinions on the issue. We are deeply grateful for the interest and engagement from Native American communities, civic leaders, leading researchers, fans, corporate partners, players, and internal teammates devoted to these formal and informal conversations.”
The statement said, “After reflecting upon those discussions, we believe our organization is at its best when we can unify our community and bring people together – and we believe a new name will allow us to do this more fully.”
The team said the change will be a multi-phase process, and that “future decisions, including new name identification and brand development, are complex and will take time. While we work to identify a new and enduring franchise name, we will continue using the Indians name.”
The name change comes after the Cleveland team removed the Chief Wahoo logo from game jerseys and caps two years ago. The league said that the logo, which features a smiling Native American, is not appropriate for field use.
“Major League Baseball is committed to building a culture of diversity and inclusion throughout the game,” MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred said in a statement at the time. “Over the past year, we encouraged dialogue with the Indians organization about the club’s use of the Chief Wahoo logo. During our constructive conversations, [Indians owner] Paul Dolan made clear that there are fans who have a long-standing attachment to the logo and its place in the history of the team.
“Nonetheless, the club ultimately agreed with my position that the logo is no longer appropriate for on-field use in Major League Baseball, and I appreciate Mr. Dolan’s acknowledgment that removing it from the on-field uniform by the start of the 2019 season is the right course,” Manfred added.
Earlier this year, the Cleveland baseball team announced that they would look into the changing of the name, hours after the NFL’s Washington Football Team announced a similar move in July. Similar to the Washington team, Cleveland has faced pressure for years to change its name.
“We are committed to making a positive impact in our community and embrace our responsibility to advance social justice and equality,” a statement from the MLB team said on Twitter at the time. “Our organization fully recognizes our team name is among the most visible ways in which we connect with the community.”
This year, Halloween will coincide with a lunar event known as a blue moon (a second full moon in the same month). To celebrate this spooky coincidence, Denny’s has unveiled a special meal that will scare the blue out of diners.
On Oct. 31, Denny’s will serve a special blue-hued version of its popular Moons Over My Hammy sandwich, which will be made with blue sourdough bread sandwiching more recognizable ingredients.
But don’t expect to stroll into just any Denny’s and order a Blue Moons Over My Hammy. The sandwich will be available at select restaurants in Miami-Dade county, and only on Halloween.
According to his LinkedIn page, Hilbrant works as a “financial professional” for Prudential Advisors and can “provide assistance on a range of financial issues-from evaluating insurance needs to helping clients grow their assets.” On Tuesday, Sept. 15, LinkedIn and Facebook profiles associated with Hilbrant were deactivated.
The incident happened at Bluewater Grill in Newport Beach, California over the weekend when Chang was having lunch with her sister. Hilbrant made eye contact with Chang while he was heading to the bathroom and allegedly told her to “go back to Wuhan.”
“Once he returned, we asked him why he would say that and he goes ‘I don’t speak Chinese, I don’t know what you’re talking about,’” Chang said in her Instagram post. “I’m so disgusted. If you see people practicing this sort of behavior. REPORT THEM.”
Hilbrant was reportedly asked by a staff member to leave the restaurant but didn’t leave immediately.
“I believe he personally knew the waitress who was serving him, because she gave him a hug before they left,”Chang said. “They were chatting for a bit so it took awhile for them to leave.”
In a statement posted on Instagram, Bluewater Grill said they “immediately addressed the situation with the customer and asked them to leave.”
“We understand that some feel there was a lack of urgency in removing this patron from the premises,” the statement continued, “However, the safety of all our customers and staff is our utmost concern and we wanted to make sure this situation did not escalate and become hostile.”
Bluewater Grill continued to note that it took the customer 10 minutes before he could pay for his bill and leave the premises as well as the hug that happened between him and one of the staff.
“Within 10 minutes the person paid their bill and left the premises. There is also mention of the customer hugging our employee, and we would like to make it clear that this was unsolicited and occurred before our employee was made aware of the situation.”
“After the patron left, we made sure that our guests were comfortable and well taken care of. The patron in question is no longer welcome at Bluewater Grill.”
Bluewater Grill, which has been in business for 24 years, said they pride themselves “on our customer service, diverse staff and commitment to a safe environment free of racism or harassment.”
“We do not condone prejudice or racism in any form. This includes remarks made by customers which we cannot control. We take matters like this seriously and are disgusted that any guest would be subjected to an insensitive remark by another guest.”
Prudential Advisors told NextShark, “Prudential has zero tolerance for discrimination and takes these allegations very seriously. This matter will be investigated to the fullest extent possible and appropriate action will be taken, as warranted.”
Since Chicken Strip is trending on Twitter (Ross Stripling), I’d just like to settle the debate on ppl saying boneless wings are “like chicken nuggets”— They’re more like mini chicken strips because you can still see the muscle of the breast. Nuggets are grounded, reshaped, chicken mush!
phillamx.wordpress.com 