Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Submitted by Justin King via The Fifth Column, Those who don’t understand history are doomed to repeat it, those that do understand are doomed to watch in horror while everyone else repeats it. The run up to overthrowing President Assad of Syria was occurring before The Fifth Column existed. I covered it when I wrote daily…
Netflix’s Jessica Jones is one of the most complex treatments of agency in the wake of victimhood that the small screen has seen yet seen. A grim show, shadowy and hopeless and unlikeable, it’s finally less about trauma than it is a murky contest between revenge and rehabilitation and the term that floats between those:…
Paris is once again in tumult on the eve of the COP21 climate summit, a series of negotiations that activists hope will achieve significant strides where past gatherings have failed. On Sunday, protesters clashed with police in the Place de la Republique as thousands more marched in the city to demand meaningful political action on…
After what was likely a heated debate around the editorial desk, The New York Times decided to rework a story that described Robert Lewis Dear, the man who killed three people and wounded nine others at a Planned Parenthood clinic on Friday, as “gentle.” A story published on Saturday about Dear’s background used that adjective,…
The New York Times this morning has an op-ed by Al Jazeera host Mehdi Hasan, whom I regard as one of the world’s best television journalists. Its primary point is one that has been recently promoted by others such as MSNBC’s Chris Hayes: namely, that in the wake of 9/11, George W. Bush diligently avoided,…
Early one weekend morning in January 2014, Janet was sleeping fitfully in her parents’ home in Toronto. A junior studying elementary education at a nearby college, she had gone home for the weekend in a state of nervous collapse. For months, someone going by the name ‘‘Obnoxious’’ had been harassing her online. He had called…
When James Kennicott, now 86, was young, he loved ice-skating on the river near his home in Waterloo, Iowa. One day, the ice cracked under his feet and he plunged into the water below. He didn’t have hot water at home. So he broke into his school to take a hot shower. “I think that…
If you’ve been following along with the Superman comics recently, you’ll know he’s having a hell of a rough time. He’s been de-powered, the world hates him, and he’s even had to get a new secret identity after Lois Lane outed Clark Kent as the Man of Steel. But it seems like DC aren’t quite…
In the latest blow for gender equality in fictional entertainment, a female agent will be one of the new protagonists of the fourth Men in Black film, according to producer Laurie MacDonald. Somewhere, someone with a penis is probably just furious about it. This strikes me as deeply funny. Not the new female MiB character,…
Dreading Thanksgiving dinner conversation? The Post’s Alexandra Petri has three foolproof strategies to get you through your family gathering. (Tom LeGro/The Washington Post) They have clustered around the table. The bird is slain and it lies before you, browned in its own suppurations. You behold it, cold sweat trickling down your face. These next hours…