'Confirmation' tries to pick up where 'O.J.' left off. Plus, we break down the first weekend of the NBA playoffs. View in your browser Share | Subscribe In the April 18 newsletter, Lindsay Zoladz debuts with a look at HBO’s Confirmation, Jonathan Tjarks breaks down the blowout-filled weekend in the NBA, and Molly McHugh offers a warning about the current bot moment. HBO OK, Ladies, Now Let’s Get Confirmation By Lindsay Zoladz The timing of Confirmation, HBO’s film about Anita Hill’s testimony during the 1991 Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings, is at once fortunate and deeply unlucky. After the massive success of The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story, we are unprecedentedly primed for a TV movie that asks us to reconsider a racially and sexually charged monocultural event from the ’90s. (That we’re currently witnessing another Supreme Court confirmation process become a total mockery of the democratic process also doesn’t hurt.) But given O.J.’s stellar ensemble cast, glorious musical supervision (I’ll never be able to hear “Who’s That Lady” the same way again), and the emotional wallop of the April 5 finale in particular, Confirmation has some impossibly big shoes to fill. It doesn’t quite succeed. Despite a transfixing performance from Kerry Washington and some promising supporting casting — on paper, “Greg Kinnear as Joe Biden” has as much potential as “John Travolta as Robert Shapiro” — Confirmation feels conventional and slight in comparison to the pulpy, 10-hour sprawl of O.J. But I still think it’s an important movie to watch and, even better, talk (and tweet and text) about. Confirmation, which premiered on Saturday, continues a conversation that O.J. (and Sarah Paulson’s masterful portrayal of Marcia Clark in particular) started, in which millennial viewers are given a chance to reevaluate, on their own terms, some of the most heavily scapegoated female figures of the ’90s. As a preteen in those days, I absorbed more jokes about Marcia Clark and Anita Hill than actual information, and even decades later, my perceptions of them are clouded by the institutionalized sexism I wasn’t old enough to identify or challenge when I was hearing their names on the nightly news. I know I’m not alone in this: I’ve had this conversation with countless friends in their 20s and early 30s since The People v. O.J. Simpson aired, and I saw the sentiment all over Twitter while searching the #Confirmation hashtag. “I do remember thinking at the time that Anita Hill was super-brave,” the writer Stacia L. Brown tweeted. “That much was obvious at age 11.” I really thought I was over ’90s nostalgia, but this current strain feels a lot more heartening than, you know, another stylishly disaffected rock band saying that "Nevermind changed our lives, man." Our cultural elders love to shame millennials for not knowing stuff, and I’m sure that as I type this someone is compiling a blog post about teens at Coachella tweeting variations on “who the f is Axl Rose?” But the great thing about O.J. and Confirmation is that they’re giving younger viewers a space to say, “I never knew the full story, but now I’m old enough to understand it, and wow, it is way more fucked up than I realized.” The internet makes that process of discovery and comprehension visible, and (as the #MarciaClark Tumblr tag can attest) it’s pretty fascinating to behold. Women like Clark and Hill were ridiculed in the ’90s mainstream media for things like their haircuts or their sex lives, but they’re receiving a lot more sympathetic treatment from the next generation, which is much more likely to think of those things as petty and irrelevant. (Further proof: a 2014 article in Slate pointed out that millennials aren’t even that scandalized by the Monica Lewinksy affair.) These pop-cultural revisionist histories don’t exactly erase the scorn these women endured in the past, but at least they make you feel a tad more hopeful about the future. So who will be the next ’90s bogeywoman to get an internet feminist reappraisal? Do I hear the words “American Crime Story: Lorena Bobbitt”? I mean, I’d watch. Ringer illustration Getty Images Bring Me a Higher Love: Five Observations From the NBA Playoffs’ Opening Weekend By Jonathan Tjarks Well, it wasn’t the greatest opening weekend. Half of the games were decided by at least 28 points. But the postseason is a marathon, and there were some promising wrinkles on display. Here are five things we learned: 1. Kevin Love is thriving at the 5. Feeling the pressure from the Pistons, who were shooting the lights out from 3 and going blow-for-blow with the Cavaliers, Tyronn Lue made the first big positional adjustment of his playoff coaching career. Love's move to the 5 shifted him from having to guard a scorching Marcus Morris, forced the Pistons to spread out their defense, and opened the Cavs big man for pick-and-pop 3s against Andre Drummond. Love finished with 28 points and 13 rebounds, and Cleveland was lights-out in his 12 minutes at center, with a 126.1 offensive rating and 90.9 defensive rating. 2. There is a clear hierarchy out West. The Warriors won by 26, the Thunder won by 38, and the Spurs won by 32. Those blowouts aren’t a huge surprise, considering the top three seeds in the West averaged 65 wins and the bottom three averaged 42. The good news for fans of the underdogs is those teams don’t have much to lose. They can play loosely and experiment with various combinations of players, because just avoiding a sweep would be an accomplishment. 3. Postseason Paul George is back. After missing almost all of last season, George made a strong case for being the second-best player in the East during his playoff return. He dominated DeMar DeRozan in every facet, and stuffed the stat sheet to the tune of 33 points, four rebounds, six assists, four steals, and two blocks. When the lower-seeded team has the best player on the floor, the upset is always in play. 4. The Hawks do have stars. Atlanta was lauded for its starless approach in Year 2 of the Mike Budenholzer era, but Year 3 has made it clear that the Hawks’ success is incumbent on their two big men. Al Horford and Paul Millsap are two of the most versatile bigs in the league, excelling inside and out on both sides of the ball. They combined for 38 points, 19 rebounds, five assists, and five blocks in their Game 1 win, presenting a ton of matchup problems for a Celtics roster full of one-way big men. 5. The Heat look good. Miami was easily the most impressive Eastern team in the first weekend, running the Hornets off the floor in a 32-point blowout. The Heat have reinvented themselves after losing Chris Bosh, becoming a pure four-out team that spreads the floor, moves the ball, and rains in 3s. Talent matters: With a surplus of wings, an All-Star-caliber point guard in Goran Dragic, and one of the league’s most talented big men in Hassan Whiteside, they are as dangerous an opponent as anyone in their conference. Poncho The Bot Next Door: What the Helper Revolution Means for You By Molly McHugh We’ve reached peak bot. Last week at F8, Facebook’s developer conference, the social network introduced its very own bot plan. Since that’s what everyone’s doing right now — Kik, Telegram, Microsoft — the bots keep coming. A quick word on bots: They’re pieces of software that automate things. The most recent examples come to us in the form of chatbots — talk to them, and they’ll accomplish common tasks for you. Some say bots aren’t displacing people and their jobs. Though that’s exactly what scares the world about AI: Technology will eventually get so good, so smart, so human, that it will replace workers. But that’s the future. The bots of right now are just adding a layer of interactivity and efficiency that we didn’t have before. While introducing chatbots to messaging apps like Kik and Facebook Messenger is the new, hot thing, there have long been people essentially doing what the new class of bots is doing. Live chat support, while not uniformly available, has been a popular feature operated by real, live humans. While chatbots are certainly not a new commodity, their capabilities and sudden popularity are. So could they — and should they — replace live chat operators? They’re already starting to. Living Actor is a system that uses a combination of bots and live chat operators to help customers with support needs. CEO Benoit Morel says that sites that use Living Actor first engage customers with chatbots. Eventually, if the bots can’t help them, they’re moved to real people to better assist them. “Almost all of our customers started out with phone or live-chat customer support,” Benoit says. “But because it costs so much, they are using a combination now. It cuts down on training costs and email.” One client, Toshiba, was using call centers in different countries for customer support, a costly endeavor. Now that it’s switched to Living Actor, Toshiba has cut costs by nearly 50 percent, according to Benoit. Benoit is quick to point out that this does not cause a sizable reduction in human jobs. “The goal is not to replace people, it’s just to do all the low-value actions.” Timur Valishev, CEO of the live chat client JivoChat, has different ideas about the value of chatbots. “I don’t think that we’ve reached the point where we can use computers’ cognitive abilities to solve problems on the same level as a human operator,” he says. “So to compare live chat with bots is like comparing humans with websites. Until a robot passes the Turing test, bots are not more than just another UI paradigm.” Valishev does say, however, that he thinks the combination of chatbots and human support has promising possibilities. Another thing about bots: They’re essentially re-creating one of the biggest problems we have with customer service. It’s maddening to call one number for this, chat with someone on another site for that — and none of that is changing. You still have to chat with the CNN bot for news, the 1-800-Flowers bot for flowers, the Domino’s bot for pizza. If anything, it’s worse: It’s not just iOS vs. Android, it’s Microsoft vs. Facebook vs. Slack vs. Telegram vs. Kik, and on and on. There’s no centralized system for your needs, no megabot that routes your questions, just like there’s no person who takes your calls or chats, decides who or what you need, and connects you to those essential messages. (There used to be, but we’ve been out-innovating 411 for a while now.) Bots are new and novel — hell, I think a cat that Facebook-chats me the weather every morning is just as fun as the next person! But this sudden influx is similar to the initial flood of apps, and we’re going to face the same problems with bots: too many of them, and not enough interoperability. Instead of installing too many bots, like we do with apps, you’ll have too many chat screens across too many platforms. It’s going to be a mess. All is not lost. There’s already a search engine for bots, an equivalent of the App Store, called BotList. But problems with fragmentation remain: Just because you can find a bot doesn’t mean it will be available everywhere. While one of BotList’s creators, Ben Tossell, says some bots are making sure they’re cross-platform (like Poncho the weather cat, even if he is a liar), that’s not going to be the case for most. “We are at the complete infancy,” he says. “Bot commands have been around for ages, but to bring it to consumer level, it’s still very early.” Most reviews of Facebook’s first bots aren’t great; they just aren’t useful enough yet. Tossell feels the same way, though he thinks things will get better. Imagine a bot, he suggests, that adds Uber to a chat you’re having with a friend so you can request a car without leaving that conversation — and then, when the car arrives, the bot sends you a quick, human-like message. What’s not helpful, Tossell says, is having to open Messenger, search for a bot, start a chat with the bot, and work around its conversational scheme. And that, for the record, is how the chatbots work now. Haralabos Voulgaris and Katie Baker

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