Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
There is a story—which is usually described as a poem but is more precisely a muddled version of a song written by the jazz singer Oscar Brown Jr.—that Donald Trump delights in reading to crowds at his campaign rallies. Trump refers to it as “The Snake” and his fans know it by that name. “Who…
Screenshot: Twitter Jacob Wohl is the type of young Internet lad who hangs around in President Donald Trump’s mentions and posts screenshots on Instagram when he gets a coveted Trump retweet. The 20-year-old financier has appeared on Fox Business—it helps when dad’s an analyst!—and, for reasons unknown, was featured in a Bloomberg profile last year…
Watching the film Phantom Thread, I kept wondering why I was supposed to be interested in a control freak who is consistently unpleasant to all the people around him. I kept looking at the other characters—his sister who manages his couture business, his seamstresses, eventually the furniture (as a child, I read a very nice…
Photo: Getty Mother Jones’ Kevin Drum, a “liberal” blogger who thinks you’d be “crazy” if you don’t have a “reflexive disgust of the homeless,” did a take today on liberals supposedly “defending” MS-13, the gang which Donald Trump is now calling full of “animals” every chance he gets. It was terrible. The impetus for Drum’s…
Photo: AP Here’s a lovely anecdote from the Washington Post about racist White House aide Stephen Miller and racist man-child Jared Kushner laughing at racist jokes told by the racist president of the United States in the racist Oval Office before his first racist address to Congress. Wheeee! From the Post: The night before Trump delivered…
Photo: Getty There are two “resistances” in Trump’s America. One—the very loosely-connected, small-r resistance led by people who probably wouldn’t call it that, but who represent some of the most threatened groups in America—is a vital part of everyday life under Trump. The other—the #Resistance—is a meme. The real “resistance” has been doing important work…
Photo: AP Another day, another nauseating peek into the hellish, unfeeling bureaucracy our country has created for undocumented parents and their children. The latest glimpse comes from a story in the Arizona Daily Star, which reported on Thursday about Operation Streamline, a fast-track program to prosecute undocumented people for crossing the border. The report includes this…
]Last month, suit-and-tie white supremacist Jared Taylor, founder of the race-realism rag American Renaissance, was scheduled to appear at the University of Alabama. For the talk—”Diversity: Is It Good for America?”—his sponsors, Students for America First, promoted it with a tweet including the hashtag “Defendthe1st.” As it so happened, no free-speech showdown took place. The…
Image: Getty Welcome to the unholy union that is Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani. On Wednesday, Giuliani opened his little mouth and screamed to Sean Hannity that Donald Trump had reimbursed Michael Cohen for the $130,000 hush money payout to Stormy Daniels. The world reeled for thirty seconds and then returned to its regularly scheduled…
Photo: Getty Images We’re well into the inelegant shitshow that is the first state visit of Donald Trump’s presidency. And despite the near-death, out-of-body awkwardness of President Trump and his ham-fisted handshakes, once again it is Melania Trump who is really the star of this deranged show that is apparently real life. First, yesterday, Mrs….