The girl was really getting the hang of the whole childhood thing. Oh, sure, the move to San Francisco had rocked her world for a while (as chronicled in 2015’s Inside Out). But she’d settled in just fine (eventually). She was excelling in school. She was tearing up the ice. She had a couple of fantastic friends, Grace and Bree. What more could a girl want?

Yep, all of Riley’s emotions would agree that their now 13-year-old girl was turning out just great. And those emotions—Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger and Disgust—rarely agree on anything.

Then, wouldn’t you know it, puberty had to come in and wreck everything.

Wreck is the operational word here, at least as far as Riley’s emotions are concerned. One minute, the puberty alarm on Riley’s emotional control bank is blaring. The next, a team of blue construction workers storms headquarters, saws and crowbars in hand, and completely decimates the control room. The workers say that it’s all to make room for the others.

And then those others start showing up.

Anxiety arrives first, all teeth and eyes and frazzled hair. Envy shows up and fawns over the control board. Embarrassment, a big galloot of an emotion, tries to hide in his hoodie. And Ennui lounges on a couch—oh so over everything—and fiddles with her phone.

No problem, right? I mean, it’s not like this is Joy’s first rodeo with meddlesome emotions. They’re all part of the team! And as long as Joy’s in control, everything will be fine. Just fine.

But when Riley goes to an important three-day hockey camp and (at Joy’s urging) goofs off with her friends, the hockey coach makes it clear that unbridled joy in this setting is not fine. It’s not fine at all. If Riley wants to be a top hockey player—perhaps even one that makes the high school team as a freshman—she’ll need to work. She’ll need to focus. There’s a time and place for joy, but this camp ain’t it.

Anxiety gently nudges Joy aside and takes the controls. If Riley hopes to succeed in this unfamiliar world, the girl could use a little anxiety. She could use a little motivational stress. Riley’s a teenager now, after all. Time to put away those childish things and grow up. Grow into an entirely different person who can cope with all of life’s present stresses and future uncertainties.

“This is not Riley!” Joy protests.

“I know!” Anxiety tells her. “It’s a better Riley!”

But is it?

The post Inside Out 2 appeared first on Plugged In.

We might look to Dr. Onda, the leader of the Kaiju Defense Force, who lost his wife and daughter to those giant monsters. Now, he’ll do whatever it takes to find the hidden Kaiju island and slaughter the beasts once and for all in order to prevent that tragedy from happening to another family.

We could also think about the actions of the kaiju Gigantron. The dragon-like monster did everything in her power to protect and reclaim the egg containing her child—an egg which had been stolen by the KDF as a step in locating Kaiju island.

And we could certainly talk about Professor Sato. He’s got the power to transform into Ultraman, a giant humanoid robotic figure who defends Tokyo from the occasional kaiju attacks. Unlike the KDF, he’d rather repel the endangered and misguided beasts than turn them into sashimi. And because of his superhero status, he chose to protect his wife and son from his dangerous profession by sending them away to Los Angeles.

But if there’s anyone who needs to learn a lesson about family, it’s Kenji “Ken” Sato, Professor Sato’s son. In the two decades since he was sent away, Ken grew up to have both a professional career in baseball as well as a hefty grudge against his father for abandoning them. And just as Ken was about to take the Dodgers to the championship game, his father, weary from years of battle, asked him to come back to Japan and take up the Ultraman mantle.

Well, Ken does begrudgingly go back. By day, he plays baseball for the Yomiuri Giants. By … well, whenever there’s a kaiju attack, he repels kaiju as Ultraman.

But remember that egg Gigantron hoped to get back, prompting her attack on the KDF? Well, just after Ken watches the KDF blow Gigantron out of the sky, the egg hatches, and the tiny kaiju imprints on Ken. And, just like his father, Ken can’t bear to see the KDF kill the creature—so he vanishes with it before the KDF can secure their asset.

And so Ken begins to discover just how difficult being a father can truly be.

The post Ultraman: Rising appeared first on Plugged In.

First, there’s Cricket, the thrill-seeking and wildly unpredictable son. Then, we’ve got the unique and whimsical daughter, Tilly. Up next is family patriarch Bill Green, a loving father but overwhelmed farmer. And finally, there’s Gramma. If you threaten her son or grandkids, she’ll come after you with a sword, mace or even her prosthetic leg in a pinch. But she also loves distributing kisses and hugs.

Bill and his kids moved to Big City to live with Gramma after they lost their farm. And the family has adjusted. They’ve made friends and even converted Gramma’s yard into a profitable vegetable garden.

But after working so hard to get their lives back together, they’re ready for a vacation. Cricket knows just the thing: a luxurious stay at Big Tech’s Space Hotel in, you guessed it, space.

There’s just a little matter of funding this spacecation. Though the Greens work hard, they don’t make enough to cover the $10 million a night stay.

Luckily, Cricket has the solution for that, too. In addition to creating the Space Hotel, Big Tech has also created a farm located on an asteroid. And the farmbots created to harvest the plants are malfunctioning.

So, Big Tech CEO Gwendolyn Zapp makes the Greens an offer: Go to the asteroid and harvest the produce for her and she’ll let them stay at the Space Hotel for free.

It’s not exactly the family road trip Bill had in mind for this vacation. But after a little convincing from Cricket, he finds himself saying a sentence he never thought he’d utter: “Let’s get to that asteroid and harvest those space crops so we can enjoy our space vacation at that Space Hotel!”

The post Big City Greens the Movie: Spacecation appeared first on Plugged In.

Trudy Ederle knew even before her feet first hit the water that she wanted to swim. Unfortunately, taking that first dive wasn’t so easy.

Trudy had had the measles. And while she survived, it permanently damaged her hearing. Swimming—or really any prolonged exposure to water—could further irritate her ears and cause her to go completely deaf.

In addition, girls in 1914 weren’t traditionally taught to swim. In fact, when Trudy’s mother declared that Trudy and her sister, Meg, would learn to swim, their father laughed, thinking it was a joke.

Well, it wasn’t a joke. And Trudy did learn to swim—taught by her father himself, actually.

But Trudy’s journey didn’t end there. As it turned out, she was fast—faster even than some men. She was invited to compete in the 1924 Paris Olympics on the first-ever female swim team for the United States. (An effort that ended in disaster after their coach refused to let them train during the three-week voyage across the Atlantic for fear they’d be taken advantage of by the men onboard.)

Once again, Trudy was told that she shouldn’t swim anymore—that women shouldn’t swim.

But Trudy had already declared her intentions: She would swim.

And so, she set out to do what no woman (and very few men) had ever done before—what everyone told her women not only shouldn’t but couldn’t do.

She decided to swim the English Channel.

The post Young Woman and the Sea appeared first on Plugged In.

No one is more excited than Hinata, a Karasuno player who’s been dying to have a real match against his friend Kenma, who plays for Nekoma. And though the reserved Kenma won’t admit it to anyone else, he’s excited to play, too.

The match is set to be a good one—even other teams at nationals are pausing to watch this fierce rivalry between two skilled teams. In fact, they’re calling it the “Dumpster Battle,” because the teams’ respective mascots, a crow and a cat, are animals that frequently pick food out of the trash.

People gather because they know it’ll be a close match. Karasuno’s offensive power is evenly matched by Nekoma’s defense—making every point a war of attrition. But someone must eventually come out on top.

The post Haikyu!! The Dumpster Battle appeared first on Plugged In.

So, when two thuggish individuals pull a gun on him in a hotel lobby and call him by the name of Kaplan, Roger immediately thinks it must be a joke. Maybe the boys at the club have set up this hoodlum bit for a laugh.

But after a forced cab ride to a local estate, Roger isn’t quite sure what’s going on. It certainly isn’t amusing him.

Then he’s ushered into the library of another man, a Mr. Townsend, who also calls him by the name of George Kaplan. And this Townsend fellow seems to think he’s nothing less than a spy, a government agent. And he wants to bribe him to cooperate.

Now, Roger is ready to laugh, except for the fact that his kidnappers are all so deadly serious and holding guns. He earnestly tries to explain that’s it’s a simple case of mistaken identity, but his captors won’t hear a word of it. Must we continue these games, Mr. Kaplan, Townsend dryly murmurs. Then he orders his thugs to quietly take care of the matter.

Which means what, exactly? What is this “matter,” Roger wonders, and how do they intend to “take care” of it? One of the men pulls out a bottle of bourbon and intimates that he intends to see Roger drink the whole thing. Roger’s always up for a cocktail, but this is ridiculous.

The suave and always well-pressed advertising exec is now convinced that his evening isn’t going to end up at the theater as he was planning.

And he’s absolutely right.

In fact, Roger Thornhill is about to embark on the mystery-filled rollercoaster ride of his life.

The post North by Northwest appeared first on Plugged In.

But both companies went to war in 1963 when Post finally cracked the code on a shelf-stable, heatable fruit pastry breakfast product. They called it the “Country Square,” and they’d developed it by stealing research from Bob’s own team at Kellogg’s.

Bob had given up on the product because he just could not find a way to make fruit shelf-stable. But he’s forced to pick the project up again when Edsel Kellogg III tasks him with finding a way to beat Post to grocery store shelves with Kellogg’s own breakfast pastry.

So Bob hires a team experts: NASA scientist (and former Kellogg’s employee) Donna “Stan” Stankowski; soft-serve ice cream genius Tom Carvel; children’s bicycle maker Steve Schwinn; inventor of the Sea-Monkey Harold von Braunhut; canned meatball whiz kid Chef Boyardee; tightly-tailored physical fitness icon Jack Lalanne; and from IBM, the smartest machine ever made, UNIVAC the computer.

It’s not exactly the team Bob wanted, but it’s the one he could get. And he’ll try just about anything to create a toaster-friendly, fruit pastry that kids will love.

The post Unfrosted appeared first on Plugged In.

The word says everything and nothing, a word both universal and unique. A simple word, four letters long, and yet it describes a place, a time, a feeling that can transcend language itself.

It’s 1992, and for Malik Johnson, home is Cabrini Green, a notorious housing project on Chicago’s South Side. The boy lives with three women: mother Dolores, grandmother Anita, and annoying little sister Diana. Family pictures are fixed to the whitewashed, concrete-block walls. The faucet drips and drips and drips. Grandma’s orange-yellow curtains hang over the window, billowing like honeyed sunshine.

For as long as Malik can remember, he and Eric have been best friends. They walk to school together. They stare at cracks in the ceiling and imagine they’re stars. Sometimes, they drag an abandoned mattress down to the playground, throw it on top of other abandoned mattresses and take turns jumping. Malik jumps higher than anyone, and he’ll say so.

But as high as he can jump, he can’t leap above the clouds above and around and inside Cabrini Green—the storms pulling at its cinderblocks, tearing at its people.

On Oct. 13, 1992, 7-year-old Dantrell Davis was walking to school with his mother when he was shot and killed. A killer had been aiming for a rival gang member, and the boy got in the way.

The murder was nothing new. Cabrini Green is home to families, yes—but to drug dealers and gang members, too. Guns are everywhere. Death is common. But a 7-year-old boy? The wider world takes notice and demands action. Police start raiding apartments, tearing through homespun treasures in their search for guns and drugs. And Anita feels the sobering, terrifying truth: It’s not safe.

For generations, the word home has come with those three words, too. It’s not safe. Those three words pushed Anita and her late husband out of Tupelo, Mississippi, and into Chicago decades ago. Back then, Cabrini Green felt different—where everyone knew everyone, where its parks and squares felt like one huge front porch. It felt like home should feel.

But where can the family go now? Options are so limited, if they exist at all. And for Malik? Cabrini Green is all he’s ever known. Despite its dangers and drugs and dripping faucets, it is home.

Here he laughs. Here he jumps. Here … he flies.

The post We Grown Now appeared first on Plugged In.

J.B. only catches a glimpse of the boys responsible before they run out of sight. And what’s more, the trip itself was for nothing: The club denies J.B.’s request, claiming that its white members might not be comfortable playing golf alongside a Hispanic man.

It’s a pretty bad day for J.B. But there’s always tomorrow, where he’s introduced as the new superintendent over San Felipe School District—the very same school district where the five boys responsible for smashing his car window go tp high school. And soon, those five Hispanic boys are sitting in the principal’s office, wondering how they’re going to be punished.

Turns out, it hadn’t been an accident. The boys are caddies at the all-white Del Rio’s golf course, and they’ve constructed a crude course for their own enjoyment. The group’s best player, Joe, had intentionally targeted J.B.’s moving car to win a bet. And though J.B. knows he should be mad, as an avid golfer himself, he can’t help but be impressed with the shot.

“How would you boys like to be the first members of the San Felipe High School golf team?” J.B. asks.

At first, they laugh at his offer. But then J.B. reminds them of Del Rio: How the club discriminates against Hispanic people; how the high school state championships are always played on the Del Rio course; how this could be their chance to finally prove that they’re just as good as the people who look down on them.

And well…suddenly the offer starts to sound a lot more appealing.

The post The Long Game appeared first on Plugged In.

When Mother Cabrini tells this to New York Times reporter Theodore Calloway, he doesn’t believe her. So she takes him there.

It’s a bold act on Cabrini’s part: She’s been forbidden by the Archdiocese of New York to solicit American citizens for funds to help the dying Italian children. But she figures if she can get New Yorkers to care about the immigrants on their own (since many of them were children of immigrants themselves), then she won’t be in defiance of the church by accepting donations.

Of course, Archbishop Corrigan doesn’t quite see it that way. Neither does Mayor Gould.

What Cabrini doesn’t understand—or rather, what she refuses to accept—is that nobody cares about 19^th century Italian immigrants. They see Italians as having inferior intelligence (since many are illiterate and don’t speak English), fit only for menial labor.

And while Corrigan feels for the suffering of the Italian people, they aren’t the only members of his proverbial flock. He needs the cooperation of Gould and city hall to provide for other immigrant groups, such as his native Irishmen.

But Cabrini won’t be swayed.

Her entire life she’s been told that she doesn’t belong. Doctors told her mother that the girl would be bedridden forever after nearly drowning as a child. Three different orders of the church rejected her for her “weakness of constitution.” And even the Pope was hesitant to send her on the first female-led mission overseas.

Nevertheless, she persisted.

Mother Cabrini overcame her illness. She founded her own order within the church. She established schools and orphanages in her homeland of Italy. And she convinced the Pope that if God would entrust the mission of informing the Apostles of Christ’s resurrection to Mary Magdalene, a woman, then the Pope should allow Cabrini to start building her “Empire of Hope”: a worldwide network of orphanages, schools and hospitals to serve the poor.

Again, it’s a bold act. Cabrini doesn’t have the funds, the political support or the immune system to conquer Five Points, the first stop on her worldwide campaign.

But she does have faith.

Cabrini knows she can do all things through Christ, who strengthens her. And she believes that if she can just begin the mission, the means will come.

The post Cabrini appeared first on Plugged In.