Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
“Margaret Atwood’s new novel is being greeted as the long-awaited feminist dystopia, and I am afraid that for some time it will be viewed as a test of the imaginative power of feminist paranoia,” the writer and critic Barbara Ehrenreich wrote in 1986, soon after the publication of Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale. To…
xA specter is haunting the straight white liberal sixtysomething American dad—the specter of his damn socialist kids. A generation that grew up eating Cold War propaganda with their cornflakes confronts one in which socialism regularly outpolls capitalism, and it’s happening across the breakfast table. New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik’s new book, A Thousand Small Sanities:…
In a 1997 review, David Foster Wallace referred to John Updike as “a penis with a thesaurus.” Unfortunately, this is my type. I have a propensity to sleep with boys who keep copies of Infinite Jeston display somewhere in their bedrooms. It’s not that this is a prerequisite — I’ve never denied myself a sexual experience purely because my partner didn’t…
Reality TV star and former pro wrestler Hulk Hogan, right, whose real name is Terry Bollea, and his attorney David Houston, left, look on as attorney Charles Harder, speaks during a news conference at the United States Courthouse, in Tampa, Florida. Review Conspiracy: Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue By Ryan…
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…
Graphic: Elena Scotti (GMG), photos: AP, Getty Images When political commentator Sally Kohn sent Aminatou Sow, host of the podcast Call Your Girlfriend, a passage from her forthcoming book The Opposite of Hate: A Field Guide to Repairing Our Humanity in which she is quoted, Sow was confused. The quote harkened back to a night…
A little more than a year since the New York Times eliminated a number of bestseller lists—including the graphic novel and manga lists—literary agent Charlie Olsen has collected more than 400 signatures on a letter appealing to the paper to restore the comics lists. In the letter, which was sent earlier this week, Olsen, a literary agent at…
Getty Over 130,000 adults combined in Florida and North Carolina are banned from reading The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander’s award-winning book about the effects of mass incarceration, according to a report by The New York Times. Earlier this month, the ACLU blasted New Jersey state prisons for what it said was an unconstitutional ban…
Photo: Neil P. Mockford/Getty Images Photo: Neil P. Mockford/Getty Images “You’ve got the LeBron James of money laundering investigations on you, Jarvanka,” Steve Bannon yells at the apex of Fire And Fury, Michael Wolff’s gossipy book about the first year of the Trump White House. “My asshole just got so tight!” Thus starts nearly 2,000…
Image via AP. New York State has launched a new “program” that would severely limit one of the few earthly pleasures permitted to prisoners during their time behind bars: Books. Directive 4911A, which is being piloted at three prisons around the state, limits the items available to inmates to just six vendors, ostensibly to “enhance…