Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Watching the film Phantom Thread, I kept wondering why I was supposed to be interested in a control freak who is consistently unpleasant to all the people around him. I kept looking at the other characters—his sister who manages his couture business, his seamstresses, eventually the furniture (as a child, I read a very nice…
Image: Getty This week, Facebook announced that it be would rolling out a new system to combat revenge porn and explicit photos being shared on the site, Messenger, or Instagram. And all the social media network needs to protect your nude photos is…for you to first submit your nude photos. Friends, please do not submit…
There had been so many arguments that week, it was just easier to hide in the spare room and close the door behind me. That way there’d be nothing to get angry or shout about, nothing to make me storm out of the house to get away from it all. I had started feeling terribly…
I interviewed Jeffrey Tambor on Tuesday, briefly, in a room with some of his fellow Arrested Development cast members, not including his co-star Jessica Walter. But it doesn’t matter what he told me. It doesn’t matter because Tambor said almost the exact same word-for-word statement — presumably crafted with help from publicists, lawyers, or both — that…
Several years ago, Jordan Peterson told me he wanted to buy a church. This was long before he became known as “the most influential public intellectual in the Western world,” as he was described in the pages of the New York Times a few months ago. It was before he was fancied to be a…
Pascal Parrot / Sygma / Sygma / Getty To mourn Philip Roth is also to mourn a particular kind of literary celebrity. If you Google the phrase literary lion, here is one of the first definitions that will be returned to you for the effort: “Noun: a noted author who has reached celebrity status.” And,…
There’s always a debate raging in the world of animation, whether it’s the presence of women in the writers room or a cartoon geek’s constitutional right to Szechuan sauce (thanks to the rather rowdy Rick and Morty fandom), but this weekend saw fandom butting heads over a rare topic: college. Instigated by ThunderCats Roar, the…
Lately I have been thinking about one of the first things that I ever wrote for the Internet: a series of interviews with adult virgins, published by the Hairpin. I knew my first subject personally, and, after I interviewed her, I put out an open call. To my surprise, messages came rolling in. Some of…
Donald Glover Photo: Rich Fury (Getty Images) Over the weekend, Donald Glover, aka Childish Gambino, dropped a video for a new song called “This Is America.” You are reading this, which means there’s a better than 90 percent chance that you’ve both seen the video and had a discussion about it already. Probably several. I…
Horseshoe crabs are sometimes called “living fossils” because they have been around in some form for more than 450 million years. In this time, the Earth has gone through multiple major ice ages, a Great Dying, the formation and subsequent breaking up of Pangaea, and an asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs and most of…