Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
react-text: 137 There may be no more direct metric of social influence than one’s ability to change language. Getting your friends to talk like you, after all, is a hallmark of adolescent power (“Gretchen, stop trying to make ‘fetch’ happen! It’s not going to happen!” barks Regina George, blond queen bee of the 2004 teen…
Imagine, if you can, walking into a movie theater in 1959, at the height of the conformist Eisenhower era, to see a comedy starring matinee idol Tony Curtis, sex symbol Marilyn Monroe, and up-and-comer Jack Lemmon. It’s directed by the guy who made Sunset Boulevard almost a decade earlier, and co-written by uber-talented I.A.L. Diamond….
Cover Photo Amy Pascal in TriBeCa. “The bigger the job you have in Hollywood,” she said, “the less you are actually connected to the creative process.” Credit Andrew White for The New York Times After a humiliating 2014 cyberattack that helped lead to her ouster at Sony Pictures, the producer decided her life in the…
Decoding the historical context behind the emcee’s economic nationalism on his new album 4:44 Until 4:44, Jay-Z’s albums could be understood as an indictment of the immorality of capitalism by a man luxuriating in its fruits. Jay-Z argued that there was something revolutionary in this, in a black man born in the projects proving himself a better…
close story-meta Photo President Trump mocked Mika Brzezinski, a co-host of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” on Thursday. Joe Scarborough responded on Friday. Credit Al Drago/The New York Times President Trump remained embroiled in a rumpus with two cable talk-show hosts on Friday, a surreal dispute featuring allegations of extortion, dueling tweets and low-rent insults that has…
Getty Remember when First Lady Melania Trump was going to make her pet cause a campaign against cyberbullying? She doesn’t either. After her husband, President Donald Trump, tweeted Thursday morning to claim “low I.Q. Crazy Mika” Brzezinski, the co-host of MSNBC’s Morning Joe, rolled into his Mar-a-Lago club with her face “bleeding badly from a…
Getty Images. Sofia Coppola appears to still be having a bit of a hard time promoting her movie The Beguiled, a film set in the Civil War South. Fans noticed that while there is a black character—a slave named Hallie—in both the 1966 book the film is based on and a 1971 adaptation of the…
Star Trek is in a weird place at the moment. The franchise is split between the Hollywood reboot movies, a glossy new TV show, and continuing tie-ins for the previous five TV series. And unlike the carefully structured canon of the Star Wars books and comics, those Star Trek tie-ins have a lot of creative freedom. The comics include…
Joss Whedon‘s unproduced Wonder Woman screenplay leaked online last month, appearing on sites like Comicbook.com and Screenrant. Due to Whedon’s vocal love of Wonder Woman, many fans viewed it as a tantalizing Hollywood “what if” story. But for some reason, few people mentioned how catastrophically, awe-inspiringly terrible the screenplay actually is. The script resurfaced on Twitter last night, this time being…
In Trump’s America, the press is under attack. You know what I’m talking about—in your head, do a montage of Donald Trump saying “fake news,” congressional candidates body-slamming reporters, and so on. But on Tuesday, that war intensified, when a swarm of bees lingered outside Vox Media’s New York City offices. What Are Bees? “Bees…