Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Credit Illustration by Edwin Fotheringham A: Hey, girl! So great to see you at Mike’s party on New Year’s. You free this week? Want to grab drinks? * B: Yo!!!!! Sorry it took me so long to respond. I’m the worst. Yes! I’d love to! First round is on me because I’m so terrible. Tuesday???…
Forty-eight hours after hosting a massive march under the banner of free expression, France opened a criminal investigation of a controversial French comedian for a Facebook post he wrote about the Charlie Hebdo attack, and then this morning, arrested him for that post on charges of “defending terrorism.” The comedian, Dieudonné (above), previously sought elective office in…
Marlene Dumas in her Amsterdam studio: ‘When I begin work on a painting it’s always total kitsch!’ Photograph: Jackie Nickerson Seven years ago, Marlene Dumas briefly became the world’s most expensive living female artist, a dizzying upward move that was reported, somewhat breathlessly, in newspapers from New York to Tokyo (her 1995 painting The Visitor…
‘Far from being ‘sacred’, as some have claimed, freedom of speech is always contingent.’ Photograph: Joel Saget/AFP In times of crisis, those who would like us to keep just one idea in our heads at any one time are quick to the megaphones. By framing events in Manichean terms – dark versus light; good versus…
Today, in the wake of the Paris’ tragedy, some journalists, here and there, also on Gawker, try to understand what this very “different” newspaper, Charlie Hebdo, actually is. And yes, I say “is” because the newspaper itself is not dead and will be published normally next Wednesday and the weeks after that, despite the slaughter…
During his show in Canada on Thursday night, Bill Cosby reportedly told a woman in the crowd to “be careful about drinking around me.” According to tweets from Richard Warnica, Cosby’s performance at Budweiser Gardens in London, Ontario took a pretty fucked up turn when a woman got up to get a drink and Cosby…
I feel your pain, bitter, lonely, nerdy guys. I really do. It sounds corny to say it like that, but I don’t know how to say it and be believed. I know that because, having experienced this emotion from the inside for most of my life, I sure as hell resisted believing it when I…
The acclaimed graphic artist and journalist Joe Sacco on the limits of satire – and what it means if Muslims don’t find it funny Joe Sacco: On Satire – a response to the Charlie Hebdo attacks | World news | The Guardian.
Police mobilize during a hostage situation at a kosher supermarket on January 9, 2015 in Paris, France. (Dan Kitwood/Getty Images) Two days after heavily-armed gunmen killed 12 people at the Paris offices of satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, two gunmen took hostages at a kosher supermarket in a Paris, killing at least four people. Police killed…
Murder is wrong, and the murder of journalists cuts especially close to the bone for anyone in the industry. So I certainly sympathize with Jonathan Chait’s impulse to offer a full-throated defense of publishing blasphemous anti-Muslim cartoons as a positive good. “The right to blaspheme religion is one of the most elemental exercises of political…