Welcome to the pre-July 4 edition!
I’m taking this week off to get some overdue projects done, and “taking the week off” will mean getting away from social media for a little bit (actually, hopefully, a whole lot), so if you need me, my gmail account is the best way to reach me. I can also be reached through my website’s contact form.
For the next fortnight: I’ll have a new piece on The Handmaid’s Tale, for the website, and more news and announcements.
For now here are some pieces from around the web, to keep you going through what is, for many in the US, a long weekend.
A New Yorker piece on “The Addicts Next Door.”
An interview with Mariame Kaba on The Intercept.
Here’s an update on the J20.
I tried watching “I Love Dick,” and found it tiresome and a bit too self-congratulatory; Emily Nussbaum gets at some of the issues here in her review, “What Women Want on I Love Dick.”
Masha Gessen has this great piece in Harper’s, “The Reichstag Fire This Time.”
It’s important to remember that many people — especially brown and black people, especially people with Muslim names —- have actually had their belongings searched for a long time now, so I’m a little dubious about Inside Higher Ed suddenly discovering what a travesty that is for academics. But, that being said, academics are more likely than most to carry around all kinds of interesting material for research, so this is a cautionary piece about what can get searched in your luggage. Combined with new rules about laptops and such, flying is likely to be a much more frustrating experience overall.
This USA Today piece on the exploitation of truck drivers shows why more places need to find and fund actual investigative journalism.
Speaking of journalism, here’s a Buzzfeed article I’ve only just bookmarked, on “How The Guardian Lost America.” Without addressing the specifics in the piece, I have to say: the paper is too much of a cesspool to take seriously, brimming with anodyne op-eds which simply repeat the same old tired opinions and outrage, and despite having produced some important work in the past (including news about Homan Square).
Hey, remember Don Draper? Here’s a reason to appreciate him.
Gentrifiers are literally whitewashing out Pilsen’s Latino/a history.
On a related note, here’s a Hyperallergic’s “An Artist’s Guide to Not Being Complicit with Gentrification.”
This piece is about “The Liberal Tech Giants Behind Trump’s Border Wall.”
Jon Osoff, the baby-faced candidate who was supposed to bring out all the suburban moms in droves…kinda failed. So this particular prototype is being dragged away.
Jena Friedman writes, hilariously, about a new Jeff Koons exhibit.
A bakery in Oakland is under attack for its Rasmeah Odeh mural.
The San Francisco queer radical group Gay Shame hosted this exhibit, “Queers Hate Techies.”
Remember when we ate more horse meat? Well, we did, says the AV Club.
From the Archives
This Against Equality interview with Josh Pavan in No More Potlucks has always been one of my favourites.
“Is Your Reading Material Ethically Sourced?” I asked, and the question is still relevant.
Here’s a roundup, from Boston Review, of some of its past pieces on animals.
In 2014, Mariame Kaba edited this anthology, No Selves to Defend: The Legacy of Criminalizing Self-Defence and Survival, on domestic violence and the criminalising of women of colour; it’s worth returning to that to think about how much has changed — or hardly at all.
I’ve always loved “Once in a Lifetime,” by Talking Heads. There are other, more polished videos around but this one, of a live performance, is a favourite of mine.
And if you missed it, here’s my last update, “Summer Is Icumen In, At Last.”
Image: Stevan Dohanos, “Backyard Barbecue,” 1947,
Don’t plagiarise any of this, in any way. Read and memorise “On Plagiarism.” There’s more forthcoming, as I point out in “The Plagiarism Papers.” I have used legal resources to punish and prevent plagiarism, and I am ruthless and persistent. If you’d like to support me, please donate and/or subscribe, or get me something from my wish list. Thank you.
