Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Track #3 from Faded Paper Figures “The Matter” (to be released Oct. 2012): Lyrics “Information Runs On” Traffic lights fall to the street, chandeliers start to swing, crashing lights at our feet. We drive through our lives like a dream, how we long for release from these nights of caffeine. Isolate the neurons the information…
Are memorials to racists of yore a present-day crisis? That was the gist of Lincoln Caplan’s recent essay in The Atlantic. Caplan wrote about the white-supremacist lineage of Calhoun College, one of 12 residential colleges that make up Yale University’s undergraduate community. Named for the alumnus John C. Calhoun, the building is a legacy to…
Paid advertisement? A soldier holds an American flag before the first half of a 2013 NFL football game between the Atlanta Falcons and the New England Patriots in Atlanta. David Goldman/AP hide caption itoggle caption David Goldman/AP Paid advertisement? A soldier holds an American flag before the first half of a 2013 NFL…
Ta-Nehisi Coates is appearing this Thursday, October 29, at Town Hall Seattle, as part of Seattle Arts & Lectures. From the opening sentence of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s acclaimed memoir, Between the World and Me, we know his chief concern is the destruction of the black body. Citing a television news interview he was called to do, he…
One of the most charming and irritating things about the “Star Trek” franchise, ever since its inception in 1966, is that it has always been oddly aware of itself. Unlike “Star Wars,” that other big space franchise, which purposefully places its narrative “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away” to make it…
If you’re prone to flights of depressive thoughts in the shower (who isn’t?), you’ve perhaps briefly entertained the notion that, since humans are responsible for every environmental catastrophe, maybe the planet would be better off if we all just died. While you might rid yourself of such a bleak thought by making the water scalding…
The past month or so has seen the publication of two books from men who, a decade ago, created questionable blueprints of what dating should be like for an entitled generation of dudes. Unexpectedly (to their former selves, at least) the new stories from these teachers—who, not so long ago, were demonstrating how to sleep…
Having disappeared from the daily headline news, Greece – whose political sovereignty may or may not exist any more, following the farcical development from this summer’s “referendum” and the subsequent third bailout – was supposed to be fixed, if only for the time being, and its economy and society back on a normally functioning track….
The cliché that comedy and torment go hand-in-hand gets another spin in the documentary Misery Loves Comedy, in which the actor Kevin Pollak interviews 50 comics, and comic actors, about their craving for the laughter and approval of strangers. Late in the day, the picture gets around to addressing the question of whether one needs…
The Four Horsemen of Gentrification. Then I saw when the Landlord broke one of the rent-controlled seals. I heard one of the four living creatures saying as with a voice of thunder, “Gentrify.” I looked, and behold, a green horse, and he who sat on it had a mason jar; and a fedora was his…