Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
In 2012, at the age of thirty-two, the writer Alena Smith went West to Hollywood, like many before her. She arrived to a small apartment in Silver Lake, one block from the Vista Theatre—a single-screen Spanish Colonial Revival building that had opened in 1923, four years before the advent of sound in film. Smith was…
What happens when fans of Joss Whedon grow up and start working in television and movies? Netflix’s remake of Cowboy Bebop. I can’t say for sure if the writers and showrunners on Bebop were, like I once was, huge fans of Buffy or Angel, the two shows that put Whedon on the map….
3, 2, 1, let’s watch something else. Author byline /Author byline Share Tools /Share Tools screenshot It’s easy to understand why Netflix felt it might be able to pull off a live-action “Cowboy Bebop,” just as it’s easy to understand why it all went so horribly, horribly wrong. On the one hand, Shinichirō Watanabe’s epochal…
TV ReviewsAll of our TV reviews in one convenient place. Crank Yankers feels much older, culturally speaking, than it actually is: The prank call puppet show originally ran on Comedy Central from 2002 to 2005, but even then it seemed pulled by the gravity of old comedic modes like stock characters and catch phrases….
TV ReviewsAll of our TV reviews in one convenient place. Congratulations to Netflix: After over seven years of commissioning original series, it finally got around to creating its own Law & Order. This isn’t intended as a slam on its new international production, Criminal, but rather a compliment. The long-running NBC procedural didn’t run…
In a memo he sent before leaving the company, a former Google employee criticized the internet giant and its employees, noting that he regularly encountered racism during his experience as a Black worker at the company. The memo, obtained by Motherboard, is titled “The Weight of Silence,” and argues that Google is lacking in diversity,…
LOU DOBBS (HOST): I know that it must just gladden your heart to see a bunch of demonstrators at an Immigration Customs Enforcement facility blocking the path of a guard and then complaining about the fact that he sought to do what is within his rights, which is to proceed to park his vehicle and go to work. TOM HOMAN (GUEST): Well exactly….
A harrowing scenario analysis of how human civilization might collapse in coming decades due to climate change has been endorsed by a former Australian defense chief and senior royal navy commander. The analysis, published by the Breakthrough National Centre for Climate Restoration, a think-tank in Melbourne, Australia, describes climate change as “a near- to mid-term…
AirPods are a product of the past. They’re plastic, made of some combination of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, chlorine, and sulfur. They’re tungsten, tin, tantalum, lithium, and cobalt. The particles that make up these elements were created 13.8 billion years ago, during the Big Bang. Humans extract these elements from the earth, heat them, refine…
Let’s start with the good: For most of its 82 minutes, Game of Thrones’ “The Long Night” was a tense, well-modulated, and gorgeously scored poem to apocalyptic terror. Unlike “Battle of the Bastards,” which repeatedly offered stunning bird’s-eye perspectives of military formations before zooming in to the chaos as it was experienced on the ground, director Miguel Sapochnik…