Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Here’s your monthly Garbage Intelligence. It arrives the first Friday of every month, instead of the usual Garbage Weekend issue. It’s a snapshot of everything that’s happening around the web. Before we dig into the data, here are this month’s three big takeaways… NOVEMBER IN JULY The US Presidential race went from historically low polling…
It’s probably not the one I wrote. It would be weird if my book were your favorite book. It’s a geeky book about music-streaming and music and algorithms and technology and curiosity and morality and where we are right now, and your favorite book should probably be an immortal novel about how we always are,…
Many people dream of becoming social-media stars like YouTube’s MrBeast or TikTok’s Charli D’Amelio. But for most who pursue careers as content creators, just making ends meet is a lofty goal. Clint Brantley has been a full-time creator for three years, posting videos on TikTok, YouTube and Twitch where he comments on news and trends related to…
In 2012, at the age of thirty-two, the writer Alena Smith went West to Hollywood, like many before her. She arrived to a small apartment in Silver Lake, one block from the Vista Theatre—a single-screen Spanish Colonial Revival building that had opened in 1923, four years before the advent of sound in film. Smith was…
First, you have to gather the cash to preorder the game at the local GameStop, where your cousin works, and, even though he hooks it up with the employee discount, the game is still a bit out of your price range because you’ve been using your Taco Bell paychecks to help your pops, who’s been…
Everyone Is Beautiful and No One Is Horny Modern action and superhero films fetishize the body, even as they desexualize it. When Paul Verhoeven adapted Starship Troopers in the late 1990s, did he know he was predicting the future? The endless desert war, the ubiquity of military propaganda, a cheerful face shouting victory as more…
I’m no maestra of the avant-garde, and consequently, my interest here is in offering neither definitions nor death knells. To mourn the loss of the avant-garde — or to seek the shock of transgressive aesthetics in increasingly arcane crannies — is an evergreen endeavor. As Roland Barthes wrote, “être d’avant-garde, c’est savoir ce qui est…
Movie studios favoring familiarity and profitability over artistry is nothing new or particularly innovative. At the moment, the Writers Guild of America (WGA) and the Screen Actors Guild–American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) are on strike against Hollywood’s profit-driven and margin-squeezing madness, throwing the craven greed of the executive class into even sharper…
Yikes, y’all. I don’t even smoke and I feel like I need a cigarette before I get this thing started. We’re here to talk about Hogwarts Legacy, and to do that we need to discuss the whole mess. Pull up a chair, pour yourself some tea, wrap yourself in a blanket, scream into a pillow…
What happens when fans of Joss Whedon grow up and start working in television and movies? Netflix’s remake of Cowboy Bebop. I can’t say for sure if the writers and showrunners on Bebop were, like I once was, huge fans of Buffy or Angel, the two shows that put Whedon on the map….