JK Rowling, Margaret Atwood and Salman Rushdie sign open letter against ‘cancel culture’

The entertainment background of Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky was thoughtfully invoked by Succession actor Brian Cox during the Succession actor’s SAG Award acceptance speech last night, just the latest example of what much of the world no doubt views as Zelensky’s unlikely path to the world stage.

Comcast NBCUniversal is celebrating the one-year anniversary of Black Experience on Xfinity by announcing plans to offer $1M in the form of ten $100K grants to emerging Black filmmakers. 

EXCLUSIVE: Canadian comedy Son of a Critch is returning for a second season.

The cast of Netflix’s Sex/Life is expanding for Season 2 with the addition of 5 new actors in recurring roles, they include Dylan Bruce (Midnight Texas, Orphan Black), Craig Bierko (UnREAL, Music Man), Darius Homayoun (Tehran, Succession), Cleo Anthony (She’s Gotta Have It, Seasons of Love), and Wallis Day (Infinite, Batwoman). Their roles are as yet unknown.

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has taken the unprecedented step of calling on sporting organizations across the world to ban Russia and Belarus from competing, as the sport and media world continues to react to the Ukraine conflict.

HBO has set an April premiere date for horror comedy series The Baby, a co-production with Sky. The eight-episode series will debut Sunday, April 24 at 10:30 PM on HBO and will stream on HBO Max.

More than 20 international media groups have heeded calls from Ukrainian news organizations to turn off Russian news channels.

Peter Debruge Chief Film CriticWhere do you go after “The Dark Knight”? Ben Affleck blew it, and even Christopher Nolan, who brought unprecedented levels of realism and gravitas to that franchise-best Batman saga, couldn’t improve on what he’d created in his 2012 sequel. So what is “Cloverfield” director Matt Reeves’ strategy? Answer: Go darker than “The Dark Knight,” deadlier than “No Time to Die” and longer than “Dune” with a serious-minded Batman stand-alone of his own.

Japanese Breakfast has rescheduled her upcoming UK tour due to “lingering uncertainty” over COVID-related “travel protocols”.The Michelle Zauner-led project had been due to tour in the UK and Europe next month in support of her June 2021 album ‘Jubilee’.Zauner has now confirmed that she has had to move her upcoming UK live dates to later this year, while also cancelling a number of her scheduled European shows.“Due to lingering uncertainty surrounding COVID-19 travel protocols, we have decided to reschedule our UK and European dates from March to October 2022,” she said in a statement this afternoon (February 28).Zauner added that her planned gigs in Cologne, Hamburg, Antwerp, Paris, Madrid, Barcelona and Copenhagen had been cancelled: “I am truly devastated we can not make it work at this time but I promise we will be back as soon as possible.”A post shared by Japanese Breakfast (@jbrekkie)All tickets will remain valid for the rescheduled shows, though refunds are also available from the point of purchase.You can see Japanese Breakfast’s rescheduled UK and European tour dates below, and find more ticket information here.October20 – Marble Factory, Bristol21 – Brudenell, Leeds22 – Old Fruitmarket, Glasgow24 – Albert Hall, Manchester25 – O2 Forum Kentish Town, London26 – Paradiso, Amsterdam, Netherlands27 – Gretchen, Berlin, Germany Japanese Breakfast recently performed the track ‘Be Sweet’ live on The Ellen DeGeneres Show in the US, which followed on from a performance of ‘Slide Tackle’ on The Late Late Show last month.Japanese Breakfast’s cover of Yoko Ono’s ‘Nobody Sees Me Like You Do’, meanwhile, recently featured on the tribute album ‘Ocean Child: Songs Of Yoko Ono’.

for Harper’s Magazine.The letter, signed by people including Salman Rushdie, Noam Chomsky, Bari Weiss and Margaret Atwood, read: ‘The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty. ‘We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters.

Harpers calling for the end of cancel culture.The letter warns against the development of “censoriousness” and “an intolerance of opposing views”.Rowling, who has recently spoken of her views on transgender rights and has sparked a controversial discussion, said on Twitter that she was “proud to sign this letter in defence of a foundational principle of a liberal society: open debate and freedom of thought and speech.”The letter acknowledges “powerful protests for racial and social justice”, but says “this needed reckoning has also intensified a new set or moral attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity.”Donald Trump is acknowledged in

Dozens of artists, writers and academics have signed an open letter decrying the weakening of public debate and warning that the free exchange of information and ideas is in jeopardy amid a rise in what they call “illiberalism.”

JK Rowling, Salman Rushdie and Margaret Atwood are among prominent figures from the arts world who have signed a letter warning of an “intolerant climate” for free speech.

Taylor Swift is among those who have spoken out about it, saying in Vogue last year ‘A mass public shaming, with millions of people saying you are quote-unquote canceled, is a very isolating experience.’When you say someone is canceled, it’s not a TV show. It’s a human being.

JK Rowling has voiced her fears for free speech after she was branded 'transphobic' for her comments about transgender people.

Naman Ramachandran “Harry Potter” writer J.K Rowling, “Handmaid’s Tale” author Margaret Atwood and “Midnight’s Children” writer Salman Rushdie are amongst 150 public figures to have signed a letter condemning the practice of ‘public shaming,’ or cancel culture as it is known popularly.Cancel culture is a term used to describe individuals who have shared an unpopular opinion or have past behavior that’s deemed offensive, who are ‘canceled’ on social media. Rowling is one such example, due to her views on the trans community.The letter, published Tuesday in Harper’s Magazine, states: “The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted.

Jake Kanter International TV EditorJ.K. Rowling and The Handmaid’s Tale scribe Margaret Atwood are among 150 writers, academics and activists to sign an open letter published by Harper’s bemoaning the “restriction of debate” in modern culture.Rowling, who has been at the center of a rancorous online debate about transgender rights in recent weeks, put her name to the letter, which said: “The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted.”It added: “We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters.

Internationally renowned Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood will take part in an online literary conversation with Canada’s former Governor General Adrienne Clarkson on Thursday, April 2, 2020, at 3 p.m. ET on the National Arts Centre’s Facebook page.

Like so many, Elisabeth Moss is living life one Zoom conversation at a time. She slides into The Hollywood Reporter's virtual chat with The Handmaid's Tale author Margaret Atwood fresh off a regular production meeting about season four of her Emmy-winning dystopic Hulu drama, full of excitement.

Margaret Atwood is encouraging the pleasure of books in a time of crisis.