Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Philando Castile, Sandra Bland, Tamir Rice; Michael Brown, Alton Sterling, Tarika Wilson It’s becoming increasingly difficult to fight the sense that, for the rest of my life, I’ll be writing about black Americans who’ve been killed, in one way or another, by the police. Every generation likes to believe that they’ve made progress that distinguishes…
The family of a Brooklyn man shot dead by an off-duty cop during a road-rage incident demanded Tuesday that the officer be charged in the killing — or they’ll “hunt him down” themselves. Zoe Dempsey, the 23-year-old niece of slain dad Delrawn Small, said, “We will seek our justice’’ — and get violent if necessary….
A second cellphone video obtained by The Daily Beast depicting white Baton Rouge police officers Blane Salamoni and Howie Lake II shooting and killing Alton Sterling, a black man, is raising questions about the police department’s claims that the officers shot Sterling because he threatened them with a gun. In the video, recorded by Abdullah…
Another day, another horrific video of police killing a black man, another round of viral outrage. As emotions brewed following the Tuesday police killing of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, La., devastating video emerged from Minnesota showing the moments after a cop fatally shot Philando Castile, 32, during a traffic stop. Philando Castile was killed…
A woman livestreamed the heartbreaking moments after her boyfriend was shot and killed by a cop in Minnesota late Wednesday. In a Facebook video, Lavish Reynolds claims that the couple was pulled over in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area for a busted taillight and that her boyfriend, identified by WCCO as Philando Castile, was shot four…
For the black community in Chicago and elsewhere, Johnson Publishing Company represented a certain kind of hope. The company’s magazines, most notably Ebony and Jet, gained prominence during the struggle for civil rights — Jet published graphic photos of the murdered black teenager Emmett Till that helped intensify the movement — and made it their…
A petition to get Jesse Williams fired from Grey’s Anatomy is circulating and is just over 4,500 signatures right now. The comments from its supporters are mostly about reverse racism. Williams speech at the BET Awards was incendiary, calling out cultural appropriation and the nationwide epidemic of racially motivated police violence. Heavy stuff for an…
Photo In a photo in Jack Daniel’s old office, Daniel, with mustache and white hat, is shown at his distillery in Tennessee in the late 1800s. The man to his right could be a son of Nearis Green, a slave who helped teach Daniel how to make whiskey. LYNCHBURG, Tenn. — Every year, about 275,000…
Over the last 15 years, there has been a marked surge in performative fandom. What used to be niche or “special interest” (read: known to a vast underground but pointedly unexplored by mainstream outlets) has slipped into the spaces it once never hoped to enter. People now talk about cosplaying and fan fiction – among…
When Watch Dogs, Ubisoft’s fastest selling video game ever, was released in 2014, it captured the hacking spirit of the times. The game’s hacker hero, Aidan Pearce, takes advantage of the connected nature of today’s smart cities to wreak havoc in Chicago while hunting down the organization that killed his niece. The game was so…