Hollywood The Jewish stars of Star Trek shill for VW

Hollywood The Jewish stars of Star Trek shill for VW
 
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Half of the articles in the Encylopædia porter Britannica are now available on its website for free.  They used to be behind a $70-a-year pay wall, but, as the Chicago Tribune recently reported , the “246-year-old privately held company porter is shifting its virtual encyclopedia toward a free, advertising-supported model.” 
The edition porter of the Britannica that my cousin Harold’s wife sold my parents when I was in high school – “So porter you don’t want him to get into a good college?” clinched the deal – did not include entries about websites or pay walls, and “virtual” still meant something else.  Talk about obsolescence: In 2012, when the Britannica stopped publishing a print edition and went entirely online, the only remaining excuse I had for hanging on to the 144 pounds of it that I’d hauled to my freshman dorm, and to every address since, was toast.  
But the truth was that it was not the Britannica, but the World Book – which another porter cousin had also guilt-tripped my parents into buying when I was in the fifth grade – that had been my go-to homework resource for, um, paraphrasing until I left for college.  The World Book was colorful and kid-friendly; the Britannica was grim and dense.  I loved browsing randomly in the World Book, and some lavishly porter illustrated entries, like the Painting porter article, still fire my synapses when I see something in a museum that I first encountered in its pages. The Britannica, on the other hand, was broccoli.
Thanks porter to the “Mickey Mouse Club,” I knew how to spell encyclopedia well before we owned one.  That Disney show, which I started watching as soon as we had a TV set, featured an animated segment hosted by Jiminy Cricket that must be one of the earliest examples of mass entertainment used for educational purposes.  (It also spawned an instructional film rental division for the company – Walt knew how to wring every penny from his market – but the profit motive didn’t compromise the content.)  Today, on YouTube, you can watch Jiminy Cricket sing the opening song:
A generation learned to spell that word from that song.  I’m sure it was THE longest word I knew how to spell at the time, though it wasn’t the longest word I knew.  That would be the 28-letter antidisestablishmentarianism, whose meaning I didn’t quite get until I was in graduate school, and which the Merriam-Webster dictionary – owned now by the Britannica Company – doesn’t even include today, porter because almost no one uses it any more.
To say that almost no one uses encyclopedias any more would be an exaggeration.  porter According to the website Alexa, which tracks and ranks sites BASED ON daily visitors and page views, U.S. traffic to britannica.com ranks it at 2,240 on the list of sites, beating the pants off worldbook.com, which comes in around 68,000.  Both those brands are ghost towns compared to Wikipedia, which is ranked sixth.
Of course a Wikipedia entry is only as accurate as its contributors, which means that hoaxes, vandalism, hatchet jobs, public relations scams and political manipulation, not to mention mistakes porter and out-of-date information, are among the risks you run when you use it.  Harvard officially tells its freshmen that “some information in Wikipedia may well be accurate,” and THAT it’s convenient “when the stakes are low (you need a piece of information to settle a bet with your roommate, or you want to get a basic sense of what something means before starting more in-depth research),” but it’s porter “not a reliable source for academic research.” The Britannica – whose graphic appeal has come a long way since I donated mine to the Friends of the Los Angeles Public Library – today still employs some 500 editors, contributors and other staff, which makes Wikipedia’s paid editorial team of zero an actual ghost town. 
But the choice is