Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Hillary Clinton has noted, at Tuesday night’s Democratic debate in Las Vegas, that electing a woman as president of the United States would be a historic first. She also, it seems fair to say, just became the first presidential candidate to make reference during a debate to how long it takes women to pee. Anderson…
“Even a race to Obama, she was gonna beat Obama. I don’t know who would be worse, I don’t know, how could it be worse? But she was going to beat — she was favored to win — and she got schlonged, she lost, I mean she lost,” Trump said, using a vulgar Yiddish word…
Seeing the whole world is a fantasy that Michel DeCerteau calls the “totalizing eye” and Donna Haraway calls “the God Trick”. This is the first image taken of the whole earth in 1967. From Wikipedia. In January, I’m headed to the Responsible Data Forum’s event about Data Visualization. While there is a lot of hype…
Suffragette: No people of color allowed. I really didn’t want to write this review. I still don’t. Not because Meryl Streep is a lie (she appears for like 15 seconds). Not because the main character never existed in this supposedly historical film (the director calls it a “composite character”). Not because Suffragette is a…
Source: iStock If you checked out Jose Antonio Vargas’s documentary about White people, aptly titled White People, you’ll know that many White people struggle discussing race (not that some of you needed a documentary to confirm this fact). Throw “White Privilege” into the discussion, and the awkwardness – and defensiveness – can multiply astronomically. What…
Daisey Ridley as Rey, left, and John Boyega as Finn, in a scene from the new film, “Star Wars: The Force Awakens.” (Disney/Lucasfilm via Associated Press) This piece is chock full of spoilers for “The Force Awakens.” Also, feelings. One of the downsides of trying to sum up the year in pop culture early in…
Over the weekend, even as most of us were celebrating the fact that a new Star Wars movie did not in any way suck, some portions of the internet got sucked into a pointless, silly debate. Is Rey, the film’s hero, a “Mary Sue”? The answer is no. Next question? Some spoilers for The Force…
The Year in Style 2015 By JACOB BERNSTEIN Sometime around the end of 2014, the publicist Alan Nierob received a call at his office at Rogers & Cowan in Los Angeles. The caller was a former client, Bruce Jenner, who explained that after years of gender dysphoria, he had begun the transition to become a…
Every year in northern India, Muslims gather in Ajmer for the Urs festival to remember the death of Moinuddin Chishti, a Sufi Islamic cleric and scholar. This year, around 70,000 clerics who attended issued a fatwa condemning terrorism, but you’ll never hear about this from the conservative media or politicians who are trying to whip…
Is Hermione Granger black? This is the question prompted by the casting of a black actor, Noma Dumezweni, as Hogwarts’ cleverest pupil in an upcoming theatre production of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. The answer is twofold. First, why the hell not? Second, what a stupid question! A better one to ask is whether…