Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Aviator Jerrie Cobb and a Mercury spacecraft. Photo from the public domain. Last month, an all-female Russian astronaut crew spent eight days together in a mock spaceship to determine how a group of women would interact during space travel as a test run for a 2029 mission to the moon. Sadly, at a press conference…
Over the weekend, the New York Times published a story about Bluestockings, “a bookshop and activist center” in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The Times introduces staffer Senia Hardwick like this: Mx. Hardwick, 27, who prefers not to be assigned a gender — and also insists on the gender-neutral Mx. in place of Ms. or Mr….
By now, you’ve heard the news. A large group of American politicians don’t want Syrian refugees coming into the country. Especially if they are Muslim. But with Thanksgiving upon us, and remembering that one time a bunch of Native Americans accepted and fed a bunch of refugees from across the pond who were persecuted for…
Photo Credit Illustration by John Whitlock, Photographs From Getty Images SO far the gender revolution has been a one-sided effort. Women have entered previously male precincts of economic and political life, and for the most part they have succeeded. They can lead companies, fly fighter jets, even run for president. But along the way something…
“These girls have to deal with men in their lives every day…they don’t listen to them, they don’t even ask them what they want. All we have to do is ask them what they want. And when they tell you, it’s a beautiful thing, man. We’re like healers or something.” — Donald Glover in Magic Mike XXL There’s…
Netflix’s Jessica Jones is one of the most complex treatments of agency in the wake of victimhood that the small screen has seen yet seen. A grim show, shadowy and hopeless and unlikeable, it’s finally less about trauma than it is a murky contest between revenge and rehabilitation and the term that floats between those:…
After what was likely a heated debate around the editorial desk, The New York Times decided to rework a story that described Robert Lewis Dear, the man who killed three people and wounded nine others at a Planned Parenthood clinic on Friday, as “gentle.” A story published on Saturday about Dear’s background used that adjective,…
The New York Times this morning has an op-ed by Al Jazeera host Mehdi Hasan, whom I regard as one of the world’s best television journalists. Its primary point is one that has been recently promoted by others such as MSNBC’s Chris Hayes: namely, that in the wake of 9/11, George W. Bush diligently avoided,…
In the latest blow for gender equality in fictional entertainment, a female agent will be one of the new protagonists of the fourth Men in Black film, according to producer Laurie MacDonald. Somewhere, someone with a penis is probably just furious about it. This strikes me as deeply funny. Not the new female MiB character,…
The storyline’s over, and now that it is, I wanted to talk a little about it. But, you know, in a general storywriting sense versus yesterday’s stroll down awful childhood memory lane. I’d written previously how, years ago, before Becky had been reintroduced into the strip as a main character, I knew Becky couldn’t be…