Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
LGBT activists are calling for a boycott of Stonewall, Roland Emmerich’s film about the riots that are often cited as the beginnings of the gay rights movement, after claims that the director has “whitewashed” the protest, according to the Hollywood Reporter. The trailer for the film, which is being touted as a potential Oscar contender,…
If you wanted to pinpoint people of my exact age and level of youthful internet engagement, you might call us the Homestar Runner Generation. Like Millennials, we’ve led rich digital lives since we were teens; like Gen Xers, we’re too old to go to a party at 10pm on a weeknight. In any event, though,…
On September 12, 2000, Jon Stewart started The Daily Show’s Headlines segment with the following joke: “The GOP accused of using subliminal advertising. Bush says, ‘Why would we advertise underwater?’” After a run of jokes about then-candidate George W. Bush, Stewart chuckles, “He’s making it so easy.” Laughs were easy in the late summer of…
Why did Greek warriors have awesome abs and pecs hammered into their armor? We know from ancient texts, pottery, and archaeological evidence that some ancient Greek warriors — like the citizen-soldier hoplites — wore uniforms that had the same aesthetic as a nippled Batman suit. And it’s pretty clear that subsequent armies often worked off…
The Internet has been buzzing about how discrimination against the Irish was a myth. All it took was a high schooler to prove them wrong. Rebecca Fried had no intention of preserving the record of a persecuted people whose strife was ready to be permanently written off in the eyes of history as exaggerated, imagined,…
She was the reigning queen of detective fiction’s Golden Age – but Agatha Christie’s most intriguing mystery remains her unsolved disappearance in 1926. On a chilly December evening, the 36-year-old Christie vanished from her English estate in Sunningdale, Berkshire. While the famed author reportedly left a note that claimed she had gone on vacation, the…
Once again, a flag has become a symbol of division. Less than a month after a massacre in Charleston by a white supremacist spurred nationwide debate over the Confederate flag, another mass shooting has fueled spurious flag rumors and spawned criticism of President Obama. On Tuesday, the president ordered all American flags on federal grounds to…
South Carolina, a state that thoughtfully welcomes its 19 known hate groups by flying a Confederate flag over the statehouse, is facing a real quandary today. When a white man walks into a black church—a church that was targeted, surveilled and burned down 200 years ago in a period when black churches were prohibited from…
New York’s Fifth Avenue, in 1974. (Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystine via Getty Images) Look at a photo of a street scene from the ’70s or early ’80s, and a lot of things look pretty much the same as today. Most of the buildings are similar. People’s clothes, on the whole, aren’t all that different, give or take a…
The Texas State Board of Education is studying how textbook publishers responded to the state’s ideologically driven guidelines for teaching history. The results, say historians, are dire. Four years ago, the Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) adopted new standards, known as TEKS (Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills), for social studies textbooks in the state’s…