Reporters in the White House press  are trying something new with Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders: appealing to her “empathy.”

During Thursday’s White House press briefing, Sanders fielded searing criticism from an outspoken reporter over the Trump administration’s policy to separate migrant families at the Mexican border.

The reporter in question was Brian Karem, executive editor of the Sentinel Newspapers. Just before, Sanders had been sparring with another reporter over of the question of why the administration chooses to separate children from parents who arrive in the U.S. illegally, with the reporter arguing that that the administration “doesn’t want to take responsibility” for this new element of its immigration policy. Read more…

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Since its box office–topping release, Ocean’s 8 has delighted some moviegoers and caused others to respond with a not-resounding shrug. 

The shruggers point to the film’s lack of conflict as an issue with the story, alluding to the fact that the lady criminals in the movie experience few setbacks in their quest to steal millions of dollars worth of diamonds, and that the setbacks they do encounter are solved easily. 

“This movie is boring,” they say, “because there is no tension or concern whether they’ be able to pull off the job.”

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Deep down, we’re all still in our goth phase. 

Pop culture in the early 2000s was full of iconic goth girls — whether it was Sam from Danny Phantom or Janis Ian from Mean Girls, everyone was a little bit in love with the goth queens of Hot Topic. 

In a meme sweeping Twitter, people are posting pictures of their ideal goth girlfriends. 

By “goth gf,” they really mean any celebrity dressed in black, from Danny DeVito to bad boy Rodrick from Diary of a Wimpy Kid.

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For a while there, it seemed like “Uber for X” was the only pitch that mattered.

To many, the rapid rise of Uber wasn’t just a major tech success story — it signaled a wholesale change that was coming to how people thought of work. Traditional jobs, the thinking went, would soon become less and less common, with predictable, inefficient employment getting replaced by the flexibility of independent contract work. The “gig economy” was underway, and it was unstoppable.

Except that it stopped. In her new book, Gigged, reporter Sarah Kessler chronicles the ascent and decline of the gig economy, starting in the early 2010s, when it seemed every service — from grocery shopping to cleaning offices — could be “app-ified” to be done by easily scalable contract work, to the death of many of those services a few years later, when their models proved unsustainable. Read more…

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It looks like Snapchat may soon be borrowing a feature from Instagram, for once.

The app is currently testing a new video feature that lets users create looping Boomerang-style videos. The feature, called “bounce,” is being tested in a beta version of the app but isn’t publicly available yet.

Snapchat already lets you create looping videos — the feature was added a year ago — but it doesn’t quite create Boomerang-like effects. (Boomerang creates its looping effects by playing clips forward and then backward.)

The new bounce feature brings Snapchat’s version closer to Instagram’s Boomerang, though. It appears alongside the other video playback tools. Using a slider, you select a portion of the video to “bounce.” The clip will play backward and forward in a loop, similar to a Boomerang. Read more…

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Nick Offerman sits down with Mashable to discuss Hearts Beat Loud, his new film about a single father who connects with his daughter while writing music together. Read more…

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Finding young planets in our galaxy is still very much at the forefront of science.

But with the help of the world’s most expensive ground-based telescope, two teams of astronomers are convinced they’ve found not one, but three baby planets.

The young planets orbit a star called HD 163296, which is located about 330 million light years away from us in the constellation of Sagittarius (The Archer).

It’s the first time the $1.4 billion Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope has discovered new planets, thanks to a special technique to help hunt them down. Read more…

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E3 2018 is in full swing, and, as expected, all’s quiet on the hardware front — but the future has been teased with one word: streaming.

Streaming not in the Twitch sense, where you watch someone play a video game for fun, but rather an à la carte style of selecting a game and being able to play it in seconds without waiting for lengthy downloads or installs.

It’s a great idea, but even with streaming, you’ll still need something to play the game on, and streamed games won’t signal the end for consolesMicrosoft announced at E3 that it’s officially working on the next Xbox (codenamed “Scarlett”), and PlayStation will likely follow suit with another console, so that war is far from over. The difference is that the next generation of consoles will be designed for streaming from the start. Read more…

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Millie Bobby Brown left Twitter on Wednesday after she became the target of a hateful meme. 

The meme has been surfacing on social media since last year, but this week it went so far as to prompt Millie, an anti-bullying advocate, to put the brakes on her main account. 

The homophobic meme, which features people writing nasty messages and attributing them to the Stranger Things actress, morphed out of the hashtag #TakeDownMillieBobbyBrown. That appears to have started in November 2017 when @KelsFiona said the 14-year-old snatched her hijab at the airport. It was obviously fake — when another Twitter user pointed out that she doesn’t have a hijab on in her profile picture, @KelsFiona said, “because she ripped it off me.”  Read more…

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Writer and comedian Keaton Patti tweeted on Wednesday that he forced a bot to watch over 1,000 hours of Olive Garden commercials and then asked it to write its own version. Prepare for pasta nachos and lasagna wings. 

The scene opens with a group of friends meeting at Olive Garden for dinner, when a waitress delivers “what could be considered food.” 

“Food” includes pasta nachos that are “warm and defeated,” lasagna wings with “extra Italy,” and unlimited stick.

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