Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
LFDHDaryl Hall is the taller, more visible half of Hall & Oates, one of the best-selling musical duos of all time who, despite being inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, never quite got the sort of critical love that many other inductees have generated. Hall and John Oates met while attending Temple…
A FRIEND of mine complains about how many of the men she meets on Tinder use corporate language to chat her up. First, they “reach out.” Then, after spending the night together, they “follow up.” This kind of flirting is banal, but it makes sense. We constantly use economic metaphors to describe romantic and sexual…
Young creatives are using social media to shape the culture we consume. But what happens when they don’t own their work? By DOREEN ST. FELIX Kayla Newman started her Vine account to record herself commenting on the minutia and mundanity of high school life. This was nearly two years ago, when she was 16. For…
The first online date I went on was in 2002, and I’m fairly certain that the guy and I met without seeing pictures of each other. Neither of us had a scanner. “You’re not really blonde,” he said, on the date. My hair, I’d thought, could pass for dirty-blonde, but when I got home, I…
His response was vague — something about being in Canada, getting distracted and dropping the ball. I should have known better than to ask. The reality is that if someone unexpectedly goes out of town, has to work late, gets sick, you probably will never hear from him again, despite the fact that he says…
George Zimmerman shot and killed unarmed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in 2012. One year later, he was acquitted of second-degree murder; four years later, he’s no closer to feeling the gravity of his actions. Zimmerman is auctioning the gun used to kill Martin on UnitedGunGroup.com on Thursday and describes it as “a piece of American history.”…
Marie Duplessis, French courtesan and Parisian celebrity, was a striking Victorian beauty. In her best-known portrait, by Édouard Viénot, her glossy black hair frames a beautiful, oval face with sparkling eyes and ivory skin. But Duplessis’ fame was short-lived. Like Violetta, the protagonist in Giuseppe Verdi’s opera La Traviata whose tale Duplessis inspired, Duplessis was…
.entry-header I just lost one of the best men I’ve ever loved in my life. It’s just so painful, I don’t even know what to do. And it’s painful because it’s not my fault, it’s not his fault, it’s circumstances uncovered through living life. People realize they want to be better people. They have to…
I wasted years with x!” I have never heard a straight man say this. But when a woman does, after a breakup, everyone immediately understands what she means. We are raised to believe that female bodies are time bombs. Any relationship that does not “work out” – which is to say, does not get a…
When my five siblings and I discovered our father’s old, clunky VHS recorder as young kids in the early 90s, we were overjoyed. The camera was massive, and I would constantly groan about weight making my 8-year-old neck and shoulders sore. Despite the heftiness of the thing, we loved using it. Together we’d film…