Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
This essay, which is featured in our forthcoming Winter issue, was originally given as a lecture during the 2015 Tin House Summer Writers’ Workshop. It was met with enthusiastic applause. Some Exposition fff Until recently I was a professor at a private liberal arts university in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, a little town located at the exact point…
Meet Jackie Biskupski, the openly gay mayor of Salt Lake City who just won the election campaigning on municipal issues, of all things. This is big news—because Biskupski is a lesbian—in Utah—no joke! Utah, the state with all the Mormons. Where that judge who didn’t like lesbians lives. http://gawker.com/utah-family-co… And sure, none of that really…
Time for your weekly edition of the Deadspin Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. Today, we’re covering farting, pizza, golf, TV decades, and more. Your letters: Phil: I saw a proud parent post a picture of their child on Facebook the other day with no shirt on (female child). This made me…
Hollywood recycles plots and story lines all the time. The same actors and actresses and directors are put in movies over and over. And the same sets are used to film completely different movies. It’s an incestuous industry. Sometimes when you’re watching a movie and you can’t quite put your finger down on why a…
52 years ago today, Doctor Who aired for the very first time—and two years ago, it took over the world as it broadcast “The Day of the Doctor,” the show’s 50th anniversary special. But the celebration was, according to Steven Moffat, nearly a total disaster: and somehow almost didn’t star The Doctor at all. It…
Update: Yes, I know there’s a cat in the picture; I took it from Slate, “The Cats of War.” I’ve used that image before, to lighten things up slightly. Apparently I didn’t succeed. Conventional wisdom on the politics of terror seems to be faring just as badly as conventional wisdom on the politics of everything….
Great news! Nobody was murdered when a big crowd of Black Lives Matter protesters got shot at by three white guys in Minneapolis last night. Five people were injured, with one having surgery on his stomach overnight, but nobody died. And that’s it for good news, all, because this story is rage. First up: Above…
On the list of things New York City’s Metropolitan Transit Authority has a problem with: menstruation. On the list of things it’s apparently totally chill about: Nazis. Well, I guess that clears that up. Just a mere month ago, the MTA was the center of a controversy over its rejection of a campaign created by…
VATICAN CITY (AP) — Two Italian journalists who wrote books detailing Vatican mismanagement go on trial Tuesday in a Vatican courtroom along with three people accused of leaking them the information in a case that has drawn scorn from media watchdogs around the world. The Committee to Protect Journalists, Reporters Without Borders and the OSCE,…
A hundred years ago, if you were a pedestrian, crossing the street was simple: You walked across it. Today, if there’s traffic in the area and you want to follow the law, you need to find a crosswalk. And if there’s a traffic light, you need to wait for it to change to green. IN…