Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
The writer and activist dream hampton — in a series of quickly deleted tweets — that Jay-Z and Beyonce have quietly put up the money to bail protesters out of jail in Ferguson and in Baltimore, and that they have been essential backers of the #blacklivesmatter movement. Complex magazine grabbed screen shots of the tweets…
M.I.A.’s “Bad Girls” video M.I.A.’s “Bad Girls” video May 19, 2015 1:40 PM Pop music and cultural appropriation usually go together like Katy Perry and kimonos, but record labels may finally be wising up to the fact that there’s a difference between appreciating and appropriating a culture. Or, at the very least, they’re concerned about…
5 Helpful Answers To Society’s Most Uncomfortable Questions How many of you are old enough to remember “We Didn’t Start The Fire,” that shit-awful Billy Joel song in which he unconvincingly insists over and over that he didn’t cause the apocalypse? <br /> Well, what I am finding as time goes on is that we…
Ad Injection:topSix years into his Presidential term, Barack Obama has finally joined Twitter. According to a White House blog post, Obama’s new account, @POTUS, “will serve as a new way for President Obama to engage directly with the American people, with tweets coming exclusively from him. President Obama is committed to making his Administration the most open…
The Rape of Proserpina, 1636-1638. Artist: Rubens, Pieter Paul (1577-1640) (Photo by Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images) “Not far from the walls of Enna, there is a deep pool,” begins Ovid’s version of the rape of Persephone. “While [Persephone] was playing in this glade, and gathering violets or radiant lilies, while with girlish fondness she filled the…
Disney‘s latest princess movie sounds worryingly tone deaf, provoking accusations of racism long before it’s due to go into production. Following this backlash on Twitter, the film’s screenwriter claims the movie has been misrepresent by the media.According to The Hollywood Reporter, The Princess of North Sudan is a “unique princess tale inspired by the true account…
Every jobs report there remains a cohort of people who say, “There’s still no evidence of wage growth, and plenty of evidence that lots of labor slack remains.” It’s based primarily on these three charts. 1) Average Hourly Earnings (I prefer to use the series with production and nonsupervisory employees since the data goes back farther):…
Figures released by Germany’s Interior Ministry just two days before the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe are sobering. They reveal a “sharp increase” in right-wing violence, with 175 racially motivated attacks in 2014, as compared to 58 the year before. Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere said asylum seekers and…
12/21/2014 Font: – + The End of Tolerance? Anti-Muslim Movement Rattles Germany By SPIEGEL Staff REUTERS Members of the loosely organized “Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the West,” gather at a major protest in Dresden in eastern Germany on Dec. 8. Disenchanted German citizens and right-wing extremists are joining forces to form a protest…
Peaceful protesters have been pleading their case against police brutality for months in Baltimore. I kept hearing people say, “Baltimore is not Ferguson,” meaning, I suppose, that we do not repress our issues of wealth and racial disparity or deny them. Baltimore, after all, has been a city in recovery for half a century now….