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Tag: Popular culture

  • Mickey Mouse is now in the public domain. Well, sort of.

    Mickey Mouse is now in the public domain. Well, sort of.

    The copyright on Mickey Mouse expires today, meaning The Walt Disney Company no longer has the exclusive rights to the character. Does this mean you can put Mickey in your own cartoon? Not exactly.

    Under current law, works released between 1924 and 1978 are copyrighted for 95 years. As a result, the thousands of works copyrighted in 1928 enter the public domain today, meaning anyone can use or reprint them without permission. That includes books like D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and films like Charlie Chaplin’s The Circus. But the most high-profile addition is Steamboat Willie, the animated short that marked the debuts of both Mickey and his longtime paramour, Minnie.

    The cartoon depicted Mickey Mouse working aboard a steamboat, making music, and vexing the boat’s captain, a large cat named Pete. The slapstick humor, anthropomorphized animals, and objects of later Disney works are present, although Mickey is much more mischievous—the antagonistic dynamic with a giant cat is more reminiscent of Tom & Jerry cartoons than the Mickey Mouse familiar to modern audiences.

    The seven-minute film was revolutionary: It was the first cartoon to feature synchronized sound—rather than just a silent film with background music—and audiences loved it. Mickey Mouse spawned a franchise that over the following century would earn more than $80 billion and make Disney one of the most powerful media companies on the planet.

    Losing out on its rodential cash cow would be a huge blow, and Disney jealously guarded its creation. When Steamboat Willie premiered in November 1928, U.S. law dictated that it would enter the public domain no later than 1984. But two different laws, one passed in 1976 and another in 1998, extended the maximum copyright term, each by twenty years. Each law passed after strenuous lobbying by Disney: The latter statute, the Copyright Term Extension Act, has been derisively referred to as the Mickey Mouse Protection Act.

    Today’s expiration implies that Disney was either unable to secure another extension or unwilling to try. In recent years, Republican lawmakers have signaled their unwillingness to extend copyright law any further on Disney’s behalf. Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.) even introduced the Copyright Clause Restoration Act of 2022, which would cap copyright terms at a maximum of 56 years—notably, the same term in effect when Walt Disney first released Steamboat Willie.

    But this doesn’t mean that Mickey is completely free. The copyright that expires today only applies to Mickey Mouse as he first appeared: rat-like and mischievous, with pupil-less eyes and no gloves. All other interpretations, introduced later—including the magnanimous Mickey who greets visitors to Disney theme parks dressed in a bow tie and tails, with white gloves and human-like eyes and facial features—remain under lock and key.

    “We will, of course, continue to protect our rights in the more modern versions of Mickey Mouse and other works that remain subject to copyright,” a Disney spokesperson told the Associated Press in a statement.

    And while Mickey may lose copyright status, he will remain Disney’s exclusive trademark. According to Jennifer Jenkins, director of Duke University’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain, any new use of Mickey must ensure that it is unlikely to be mistaken for a Disney product. “There might be a risk of confusion if you use Mickey as a brand identifier on the kind of merchandise Disney sells,” Jenkins writes. “Consumers may also be confused if Mickey is used in an artistic work in a way that suggests it is a Disney production, for example by appearing as a logo at the beginning of an animation.”

    On January 1, 2022, A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh entered the public domain, bringing the characters with it. The following day, wireless company Mint Mobile released a commercial in which actor Ryan Reynolds reads a version of the story. That May, British director Rhys Frake-Waterfield released stills from his film Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey, a horror flick in which Pooh and his sidekick Piglet revert to a feral state and mow down coeds after their human companion Christopher Robin leaves for college.

    Just as with Mickey, Frake-Waterfield could only use Milne’s characters as they were depicted in the original book: Pooh was first drawn in his iconic red shirt in 1932, meaning that version of Pooh is still under copyright protection. Characters introduced in later works, like the buoyant Tigger who debuted in 1928’s The House at Pooh Corner, also remained protected. (The House at Pooh Corner also falls into the public domain today, and Tigger is expected to be featured in Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey 2, premiering next month.)

    What does all of this mean for Mickey Mouse? What does it matter if one particular version of a cartoon character enters the public domain?

    Regardless of the artistic merit of a horror movie about Winnie-the-Pooh—and critics apparently found very little—the public domain is a boon for creative expression, allowing people to use established characters and works in new and inventive ways. Ironically, Steamboat Willie benefited significantly from the public domain. The cartoon made extensive use of the song “Turkey in the Straw,” a familiar tune with uncomfortable racist origins that dates back to the pre-Civil War era.

    And “the Mickey character itself is based on such public domain fodder,” Jenkins writes. “His personality and antics drew from silent film stars such as Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks,” as Walt Disney and animator Ub Iwerks acknowledged at the time. Even the cartoon’s title was a reference to the Buster Keaton film Steamboat Bill, Jr., released six months before Steamboat Willie. Since movie titles and personality traits are generally not copyrightable, all of this was fair game when Disney crafted Mickey Mouse.

    Joe Lancaster

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  • How Jason Aldean Explains Donald Trump (And Vice Versa)

    How Jason Aldean Explains Donald Trump (And Vice Versa)

    The commercial success of the country star Jason Aldean’s ode to small-town vigilantism helps explain the persistence of Donald Trump’s grip on red America.

    Aldean’s combative new song, “Try That in a Small Town,” offers a musical riff on the same core message that Trump has articulated since his entry into politics: that America as conservatives understand it is under such extraordinary assault from the multicultural, urbanized modern left that any means necessary is justified to repel the threat.

    In Aldean’s lyrics and the video he made of his song, those extraordinary means revolve around threats of vigilante force to hold the line against what he portrays as crime and chaos overrunning big cities. In Trump’s political message, those means are his systematic shattering of national norms and potentially laws in order to “make America great again.”

    Read: Trump’s rhetoric of white nostalgia

    Like Trump, Aldean draws on the pervasive anxiety among Republican base voters that their values are being marginalized in a changing America of multiplying cultural and racial diversity. Each man sends the message that extreme measures, even extending to violence, are required to prevent that displacement.

    “Even for down-home mainstream conservative voters … this idea that we have to have a cultural counterrevolution has taken hold,” Patrick Brown, a fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, told me. “The fact that country music is a channel for that isn’t at all surprising.”

    Aldean’s belligerent ballad, whose downloads increased more than tenfold after critics denounced it, follows a tradition of country songs pushing back against challenges to America’s status quo. That resistance was expressed in such earlier landmarks as Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.,” a staple at Republican rallies since its 1984 release. Aldean even more directly channels Merle Haggard’s 1970 country smash, which warned that those opposing the Vietnam War and “runnin’ down my country” would see, as the title proclaimed, “the fightin’ side of me.” (Earlier, Haggard expressed similar ideas in his 1969 hit, Okie From Muskogee, which celebrated small-town America, where “we don’t burn our draft cards down on Main Street.”)

    Haggard’s songs (to his later ambivalence) became anthems for conservatives during Richard Nixon’s presidency, as did Greenwood’s during Ronald Reagan’s. That timing was no coincidence: In both periods, those leaders defined the GOP largely in opposition to social changes roiling the country. This is another such moment: Trump is centering his appeal on portraying himself as the last line of defense between his supporters and an array of shadowy forces—including “globalist elites,” the “deep state,” and violent urban minorities and undocumented immigrants—that allegedly threaten them.

    Aldean, though a staunch Trump supporter, is a performer, not a politician; his song expresses an attitude, not a program. Yet both Aldean and Trump are tapping the widespread belief among conservative white Christians, especially those in the small towns Aldean mythologizes, that they are the real victims of bias in a society inexorably growing more diverse, secular, and urban.

    In various national polls since Trump’s first election, in 2016, nine in 10 Republicans have said that Christianity in the U.S. is under assault; as many as three-fourths have agreed that bias against white people is now as big a problem as discrimination against minorities; and about seven in 10 have agreed that society punishes men just for acting like men and that white men are now the group most discriminated against in American society.

    The belief that Trump shares those concerns, and is committed to addressing them, has always keyed his connection to the Republican electorate. It has led GOP voters to rally around him each time he has done or said something seemingly indefensible—a process that now appears to be repeating even with the January 6 insurrection.

    In a national survey released yesterday by Bright Line Watch—a collaborative of political scientists studying threats to American democracy—60 percent of Republicans (compared with only one-third of independents and one-sixth of Democrats) described the January 6 riot as legitimate political protest. Only a little more than one in 10 Republicans said that Trump committed a crime in his actions on January 6 or during his broader campaign to overturn the 2020 presidential election result.

    The revisionist whitewashing of January 6 among conservatives helps explain why Aldean, without any apparent sense of contradiction or irony, can center his song on violent fantasies of “good ol’ boys, raised up right” delivering punishment to people who “cuss out a cop” or “stomp on the flag.” Trump supporters, many of whom would likely fit Aldean’s description of “good ol’ boys,” did precisely those things when they stormed the Capitol in 2021. (A January 6 rioter from Arkansas, for instance, was sentenced this week to 52 months in prison for assaulting a cop with a flag.) Yet Aldean pairs those lyrics with images not of the insurrection but of shadowy protesters rampaging through city streets.

    By ignoring the January 6 attack while stressing the left-wing violence that sometimes erupted alongside the massive racial-justice protests following the 2020 murder of George Floyd, Aldean, like Trump, is making a clear statement about whom he believes the law is meant to protect and whom it is designed to suppress. The video visually underscores that message because it was filmed outside a Tennessee courthouse where a young Black man was lynched in 1927. Aldean has said he was unaware of the connection, and he’s denied any racist intent in the song. But as the Vanderbilt University historian Nicole Hemmer wrote for CNN.com last week, “Whether he admits it or not, both Aldean’s song and the courthouse where a teen boy was murdered serve as a reminder that historically, appeals to so-called law and order often rely just as much on White vigilantism as they do on formal legal procedures.”

    Aldean’s song, above all, captures the sense of siege solidifying on the right. It reflects in popular culture the same militancy in the GOP base that has encouraged Republican leaders across the country to adopt more aggressive tactics against Democrats and liberal interests on virtually every front since Trump’s defeat in 2020.

    A Republican legislative majority in Tennessee, for instance, expelled two young Black Democratic state representatives, and a GOP majority in Montana censured a transgender Democratic state representative and barred her from the floor. Republican-controlled states are advancing incendiary policies that might have been considered unimaginable even a few years ago, like the program by the Texas state government to deter migrants by installing razor wire along the border and floating buoys in the Rio Grande. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy raised the possibility of impeaching Joe Biden. The boycott of Bud Light for simply partnering on a promotional project with a transgender influencer represents another front in this broad counterrevolution on the right. In his campaign, Trump is promising a further escalation: He says if reelected, he will mobilize federal power in unprecedented ways to deliver what he has called “retribution” for conservatives against blue targets, for instance, by sending the National Guard into Democratic-run cities to fight crime, pursuing a massive deportation program of undocumented immigrants, and openly deploying the Justice Department against his political opponents.

    Brown, of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, pointed out that even as Republicans at both the state and national levels push this bristling agenda, they view themselves not as launching a culture war but as responding to one waged against them by liberals in the media, academia, big corporations, and advocacy groups. The dominant view among Republicans, he said, is that “we’re trying to run a defensive action here. We are not aggressing; we are being aggressed upon.”

    That fear of being displaced in an evolving America has become the most powerful force energizing the GOP electorate—what I’ve called “the coalition of restoration.” From the start of his political career, Trump has targeted that feeling with his promise to “make America great again.” Aldean likewise looks back to find his vision of America’s future, defending his song at one concert as an expression of his desire to see America “restored to what it once was, before all this bullshit started happening to us.”

    Read: How working-class white voters became the GOP’s foundation

    As Brown noted, the 2024 GOP presidential race has become a competition over who is most committed to fighting the left to excavate that lost America. Aldean’s song and video help explain why. He has written a battle march for the deepening cold war between the nation’s diverging red and blue blocs. In his telling, like Trump’s, traditionally conservative white Americans are being menaced by social forces that would erase their way of life. For blue America, the process Aldean is describing represents a long-overdue renegotiation as previously marginalized groups such as racial minorities and the LGBTQ community demand more influence and inclusion. In red America, he’s describing an existential threat that demands unconditional resistance.

    Most Republicans, polls show, are responding to that threat by uniting again behind Trump in the 2024 nomination race, despite the credible criminal charges accumulating against him. But the real message of “Try That in a Small Town” is that whatever happens to Trump personally, most voters in the Republican coalition are virtually certain to continue demanding leaders who are, like Aldean’s “good ol’ boys raised up right,” itching for a fight against all that they believe endangers their world.

    Ronald Brownstein

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  • Hiccups Have a Curious Connection to Cancer

    Hiccups Have a Curious Connection to Cancer

    Colleen Kennedy, a retired medical assistant, was prepared for the annihilation of chemotherapy and radiation treatment for stage-three lung cancer. She hadn’t expected the hiccup fits that started about halfway through her first treatment round. They left her gasping for air and sent pain ricocheting through her already tender body.  At times, they triggered her gag reflex and made her throw up. After they subsided, she felt tired, sore, breathless—as if she’d just finished a tough workout. They were, Kennedy, now 54, told me, “nothing compared to what we would consider normal hiccups at all.” They lasted for nearly a year.

    Hiccups are one of the most common bodily experiences that humans (and, rats, squirrels, rabbits, cats, dogs, and horses) have; even fetuses get them. When we hiccup, the diaphragm involuntarily contracts and the vocal cords snap closed, producing the eponymous “hic” sound. These spasms usually disappear within a few minutes. Compared with cancer’s existential threat and the brutal reality of treating it, hiccups are innocuous, banal, and unserious. But these two experiences are, peculiarly, connected. As many as 40 percent of cancer patients deal with bouts of hiccups during their illness. For a smaller subset—about one in 10—those spells last for more than 48 hours.

    Chronic hiccups interrupt almost every aspect of life. They disrupt concentration and conversations. They shake a person awake. Eating, drinking, and swallowing can feel like choking. Often, chest aches linger long after a hiccupping fit subsides.

    And they are difficult to treat. Doctors have some off-label prescriptions at their disposal, but none has been rigorously tested—none has been proved to work any better than home remedies. Kennedy tried to eradicate her hiccups with deep, forceful inhales and by drinking water from the far rim of a glass; she also trained herself to exhale before drinking or eating to limit the amount of air she swallowed. “Sometimes it worked, but most times it didn’t,” she said. Many try chiropractice or acupuncture. Others recruit household items: sugar, lemons, vinegar, a pencil, a cold spoon. Only one hiccup drug has ever been approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

    Hiccups, one of the most basic physiological features of human life, remain deeply mysterious and surprisingly understudied—partly because their fleeting nature makes them hard to examine, partly because they just seem so harmless. But when they’re not, hiccups confront us with how helpless we can be against our own body’s whims.

    Read: The two technologies changing the future of cancer treatment

    In popular culture, hiccups are a joke: In a Looney Tunes bit from 1942, Daffy Duck’s hiccups send his hat bouncing. In a 2005 episode of Foster’s Home For Imaginary Friends, Bloo tries everything to cure his hiccups—he pours a box of sugar into his mouth, breathes into a brown paper bag, drinks hot sauce, eats peanut butter, gets scared, takes small sips and big gulps, stands on his head, brushes his teeth while singing, swallows a lemon. Nothing works. In 1937’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Dopey accidentally swallows a bar of soap and starts hiccuping bubbles. In 1970’s Aristocats, Uncle Waldo gets hiccups from drinking too much. In 1975’s Monty Python and the Holy Grail, a hiccuping guard is commanded by the king to get a drink to rid him of his ailment. In a 1992 episode of The Simpsons, a man who’s been hiccupping for 45 years gives this four-second interview to the local Springfield TV news: “Hic—kill me—hic—kill me—hic—kill me.”

    In medicine, hiccups are a conundrum. “There’s really no benefit to a hiccup, as far as anyone knows,” Aminah Jatoi, a Mayo Clinic oncologist who studies hiccups, told me. A transient symptom that appears and disappears randomly, hiccups are nearly impossible to study with rigor. Experiments on treatments are, accordingly, a nightmare to orchestrate. To date, only a handful of randomized, controlled trials have studied pharmacological treatments for hiccups; none recruited more than 40 patients. Most studies rely on storytelling: single-patient case reports, limited case series, and analyses of databases of doctor’s notes.

    What we do know: A sudden temperature shift can bring hiccups on, as can drinking alcohol, eating spicy food, and getting excited or stressed. High blood sugar can be to blame. So can low sodium or electrolytes. Many drugs—including steroids, chemotherapy agents, benzodiazepines, opioids, nicotine, antibiotics, anesthesia, and anti-nausea and blood-pressure medicines—are linked with hiccups. Some drugs used to treat intractable hiccups can cause hiccups. In one case study, a patient’s hiccups were incited by a hair brushing against the eardrum; in another, from 1988, the culprit was an ant crawling around the eardrum.

    The medical conditions associated with hiccups range the body’s entire upper half: stroke, brain injury, meningitis, multiple sclerosis, ear infection, rhinitis, goiters, sore throat, pneumonia, bronchitis, asthma, tuberculosis, fluid in the lungs or heart, bloating, gas, pregnancy, hernias, ulcers, liver disease, kidney disease. And cancer.

    Derek Thompson: The surprising reason for the decline in cancer mortality

    Experts offer two main explanations for the cancer-hiccup connection. In one, cancers that invade the chest, throat, or head (that is, anything along the route of a hiccup) provoke them. In the other, medications prescribed to cancer patients— including chemotherapy drugs, steroids, and opioids—set them off. Regardless of whether cancer itself is to blame or whether they’re a side effect of treatment, hiccups add another layer of misery to the experience.

    One study published in 2022 showed that hiccups were a major detriment to the quality of life of about one in 20 of the cancer patients surveyed. Among those with hiccups, almost one in three said they struggled to relax or recreate; a smaller portion said they couldn’t enjoy meals. In another study of 320 cancer patients, hiccups sent one in 10 to the hospital for help. Other research suggests that upwards of three-quarters of hiccup-struck patients deal with the spasms without medical intervention. In a survey of 90 cancer-health-care providers with experience with hiccups, 40 percent rated their patients’ hiccup severity as worse than their nausea and vomiting.

    Even so, experts say, hiccups remain an aside for both patients and practitioners.

    Given the rapidity of physician visits—on average about 23 minutes, by one measure, for patients with cancer—hiccups may simply fall too low on a list of preoccupations to warrant mention, but “I think part of what happens is patients feel a little embarrassed bringing it up,” Jatoi said. Or “the patient may want to be a ‘good’ patient and not complain,” says Thomas Smith, an oncologist and palliative-medicine specialist at Johns Hopkins—perhaps because they fear their doctors will modify their treatment course if they speak up about any negative side effects.

    Oncologists, for their part, don’t consistently or directly ask about hiccups in the way that they screen for pain, nausea, and trouble breathing. “I don’t know of a single symptom-assessment scale in use that has a line for hiccups,” Smith told me. Some brush off patients who do complain of the spasms. “My doctors just shook their heads like I was joking when I told them I got the hiccups all the time,” one patient wrote to Mayo Clinic hiccup researchers.

    Uri Bram: The cure for hiccups exists

    And so hiccups are relegated to the category of “orphan” symptoms—prevalent, distressing, characteristically unaddressed. Other such symptoms include muscle cramps, itchiness, muscle twitching, restless legs syndrome, loss or distortion of taste, dry mouth, and sweating. The success of palliative care depends on alleviating orphan symptoms: Every hiccup or itch or tingling foot, every flush of sweat or bout of constipation tethers patients to a raw state of awareness. “It’s a common reminder that you have chemotherapy, which is a constant reminder you have cancer, which is a constant reminder you’re facing your mortality,” Smith said. Treating hiccups offers medical relief in the form of escape. “It may make it possible for patients to have a few hours where they don’t think about cancer.”

    Jatoi said she often warns patients who are about to start a potentially hiccup-inducing regimen. “That helps patients speak up,”  she said, which is a step toward finding relief.   Oncologists can try prescribing a muscle-spasm treatment, for example, an off-label use that seems to help some patients. They might tweak the chemotherapy regimen to swap in drugs less likely to cause hiccups. The one treatment for hiccups that the FDA has approved—chlorpromazine, an antipsychotic first synthesized 72 years ago—can come with serious side effects, which research has shown to include low blood pressure and delirium.

    In the absence of clinically proven solutions, most hiccup sufferers are shepherded toward home remedies—breath-holding; drinking through hard-to-suck straws; swallowing spoonfuls of sugar, peanut butter, or vinegar.  “None of them have been tested to see how effective they are,”  Smith said. But without solid alternatives, he added, they’re worth trying. After all, unlike the hiccups themselves, “they’re completely harmless.”

    Marion Renault

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  • Marrying Woman Who Doesn’t Eat Her Pizza Crusts Best Decision Man Ever Made

    Marrying Woman Who Doesn’t Eat Her Pizza Crusts Best Decision Man Ever Made

    HOUSTON—Expressing overwhelming gratitude for his partner, local man Tyler Dorfman told reporters Monday that marrying his wife Kelsey Dorfman, a woman who doesn’t eat her pizza crusts, was the best decision he ever made. “It’s basically double the crusts, or kind of infinity crusts when you think about how much more pizza in our lifetime we still have left to eat,” said Dorfman, who shuddered with dread as he speculated what would have become of his life if he had never met the woman who left the discarded crusts piled on the edge of her plate every time the couple ordered pizza approximately two to three times a month. “Yep, I pretty much won the jackpot with this one. Sometimes I even dip them in ranch dressing. Otherwise, we fight constantly and it’s pretty much a loveless marriage, but I can’t get enough of these crusts!” At press time, Dorfman added that if the couple ever had a kid, hopefully the child wouldn’t like to eat their pizza crusts either.

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