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Netflix Says It’s Business as Usual. Is That Good Enough? Long Hollywood’s leading innovator, the streaming service is staying the course, despite serious challenges to its business and questions about its content. .......... For years, Netflix has been the leading innovator in Hollywood, spearheading a revolution in how people around the world watch movies and television. Now, confronting the loss of subscribers for the first time in a decade — with more losses expected this year — Netflix’s main response seems to be an effort to crack down on password sharing among friends and family members, as well as an introduction of a lower-priced advertising tier. There is some concern in Hollywood and on Wall Street that those moves are not enough. ......... The savior to Netflix is they spend $17 billion on content, and they need more ‘Stranger Things’ and less ‘Space Force.’” ........ Netflix reached more than 221 million subscribers worldwide by taking chances: greenlighting ambitious content, paying for shows it believed in whether or not they featured big names, giving great latitude to famed directors like Spike Lee and Martin Scorsese. ........ In 2019 — when Disney+ and Apple TV+ were just getting started and HBO Max did not exist — Netflix spent $2.6 billion on marketing. In 2021, when competition greatly increased, it spent $2.5 billion.......... the company still intends to spend some $17 billion on content this year. ......... Netflix had fallen from second to fourth place in the firm’s annual streaming customer satisfaction survey, behind HBO Max, Disney+ and Hulu. .......... by the end of 2025 nearly a third of the subscriber base would pay for the cheaper ad-supported model, roughly 100 million users. ......... In the end, though, Netflix’s success will most likely come down to how well it spends its $17 billion content budget.
Updated Covid Shots Are Coming. Will They Be Too Late? The government has greenlit new vaccines to defend against the latest Omicron variants. But the shots won’t arrive until the fall, and cases are rising now. ......... The most evasive forms of Omicron yet, known as BA.4 and BA.5, appear to be driving a fresh surge of cases across much of the United States. The same subvariants have sent hospital admissions climbing in Britain, France, Portugal, Belgium and Israel. ....... In the worst case, epidemiologists have predicted some 200,000 Covid deaths in the United States within the next year. ........ More than half of vaccinated Americans have not received a booster. Three-quarters of those eligible for a second booster have not gotten one. ......... This spring, people age 50 and older who had received a single booster were dying from Covid at four times the rate of those with two booster doses ....... whereas flu viruses typically turn over in the course of years, new coronavirus variants can emerge and then start stampeding across the world within months.
How TikTok Became a Best Seller Machine #BookTok, where enthusiastic readers share reading recommendations, has gone from being a novelty to becoming an anchor in the publishing industry and a dominant driver of fiction sales. ......... Publishers were surprised, authors were surprised, even the readers making those TikTok videos were surprised. ........ A year later, the hashtag #BookTok has become a sustained and powerful force in the world of books, helping to create some of the biggest sellers on the market. ........ Books by the writer Colleen Hoover, for example, became a sensation on TikTok, and Ms. Hoover is now one of the best selling authors in the country. NPD BookScan, which tracks the sale of most printed books in the United States, said that of the ten best selling books so far this year, Ms. Hoover has written four. .........
no other form of social media has ever had this kind of impact on sales
........ BookTok is not dominated by the usual power players in the book world such as authors and publishers but by regular readers, many of them young, who share recommendations and videos of themselves talking about the books they love, sometimes weeping or screaming or tossing a copy across the room. .......... In essence, BookTok supercharges something that’s always been essential to selling a book: word of mouth. ......... “It’s not one video that makes a book explode in sales,” said Ms. Brown from Doubleday. “It’s this grass roots explosion of people creating the videos and then organically, by word of mouth, it grows from there.”The Best Films of 2022, So Far Here are the movies that our critics say have made the year a strong one onscreen.
The 25 Most Significant New York City Novels From the Last 100 Years Four writers and one bookseller gathered over Zoom to make a list devoted to fiction in which the city is more than mere setting. .......... If anything, New York’s scale and complexity — the diversity of neighborhoods and industries and lives that coexist here — are what make it an inexhaustible and consistently compelling setting. .......... Also, I think there’s a version of New York where people almost never leave their apartments and aren’t that interested in the city, and she’s on that list for me. There’s something hermetic about her work that feels true to New York. ........ “The aim is a realism dilated to deal with the almost surreal state of our everyday American life,” he wrote in response to readers of an early excerpt from the book. “Invisible Man” (1952) tracks the pilgrimage an unnamed narrator — a Black American — takes across the country’s racist underbelly. He begins in the Deep South, with all its attendant humiliations, then joins the Great Migration by moving to Harlem, where he comes across an old couple getting evicted and argues with the authorities on their behalf. His gift for oration makes him useful to the Brotherhood (a stand-in for the Communist Party, with which Ellison grew disenchanted during World War II), but just as the narrator’s profile begins to rise, making it harder for the Brotherhood to order him around, he’s pushed aside. Soon after, he sees an old friend, Brother Clifton, get shot and killed for having the nerve to assert his humanity to a police officer. .......... but in New York, everybody comes from somewhere else, kind of, and the idea that those histories and the national history are also baked into the city is something that doesn’t always come through .......... To what extent is race in America, particularly Blackness, a choice, and to what extent is it an inheritance? What are its various obligations, privileges and betrayals? “Passing” (1929), a classic of the Harlem Renaissance, ripples with the complexity of such questions. Set mostly in 1920s Manhattan, the novella follows Irene Redfield, a light-skinned Black society wife, as she reconnects with Clare Kendry, an acquaintance from childhood who has embraced her “white-passing” features, severing nearly all ties to her past and taking a wealthy white husband. .......... At one point, the book alludes to Rhinelander v. Rhinelander, the 1925 divorce trial in which a white man accused his wife of obscuring her mixed-race ancestry. .......... Lutie Johnson, a single mother hellbent on providing a better life for her 8-year-old son, moves into a tiny Harlem apartment on 116th Street, a temporary arrangement that gets her “just one step farther up on the ladder of success,” though she’s hemmed in by a handsy super, a neighbor who’s a madam, a son who unwittingly runs afoul of the law and, of course, various power structures. ..........
