| “Haitian Devil, Go to Your Country” |
[22 Jul 2015|03:32pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2015/07/haiti_s_refugee_crisis_the_heartbreaking_plight_of_haitians_kicked_out_of.html FOND PARISIEN, Haiti—André Joseph recalls that his crops were almost ready to harvest the night a group of men armed with guns attacked his home in Neiba, in the southwestern Dominican Republic, driving him and his family out into the fields. Life in Neiba wasn’t always easy for Joseph—he remembers waking up at 5 a.m. for 14-hour days in the fields—but 40 years after arriving in the Dominican Republic, he had built a life and a comfortable home for his wife and 15-year-old son. All that disappeared that night, about one month ago. After camping out at a neighboring farm, he appealed to the police to help him regain his home. Instead, they put him on a bus to Haiti, the country where he was born but hadn’t seen since he was 12 years old. “I lost 40 years of work just because I’m not Dominican,” he says.
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| To See Which Way the Wind Blows |
[22 Jul 2015|08:31pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2015/07/bob_dylan_at_newport_dylan_goes_electric_by_elijah_wald_reviewed.html Fifty years ago, on July 25, 1965, the tousle-headed poet who had voiced his generation’s loftiest ideals of nonviolent protest came back to his spiritual home of many years, the Newport Folk Festival; strapped on an electric guitar for the first time in front of a band; and let loose a ripping sneer: “Aiiiii ain’t gonna wurk on Maggie’s fahm no mo’!” The congregation of folk music purists hissed, booed, threw bottles, and drove Bob Dylan from the stage, while the movement’s patron saint Pete Seeger had to be restrained from taking an ax to the power cables. And nothing was ever the same.
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| Grillax, Bro |
[22 Jul 2015|08:47pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2015/07/grilling_feminism_and_masculinity_a_grand_unified_theory.html I hate how much I love to grill. It’s not that I’m inclined to vegetarianism or that I otherwise object to the practice itself. But I’m uncomfortable with the pleasure I take in something so conventionally masculine. Looming over the coals, tongs in hand, I feel estranged from myself, recast in the role of suburban dad. At such moments, I get the sense that I’ve fallen into a societal trap, one that reaffirms gender roles I’ve spent years trying to undo. The whole business feels retrograde, a relic of some earlier, less inclusive era.
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| I Am Cait |
[22 Jul 2015|09:06pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/television/2015/07/i_am_cait_on_e_reviewed_caityln_jenner_s_reality_series_would_benefit_from.html One thing many feared with I Am Cait—the eight-episode reality series following Caitlyn Jenner as she begins to live life as a transgender female—is that it would be exploitative, either of Jenner herself or the trans community at large. Airing on E!, made by the producers of Keeping Up With the Kardashians, and focusing on a story that, not so long ago, was the subject of constant tabloid snickering, it could easily seem crass or disrespectful. Starring Jenner, who has spent years on Keeping Up With the Kardashians at the right hand of ex-wife Kris Jenner, reality TV’s most accomplished operator, it could easily seem self-aggrandizing or self-serving.
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| Diehard Holmies |
[22 Jul 2015|11:21pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/users/2015/07/james_holmes_fandom_years_after_the_aurora_movie_theater_shooting_holmies.html In the summer of 2012, the mug shot of the man with tangerine hair spread across the world’s televisions and computer screens. James Holmes was locked up in a Colorado jail cell on suspicion of storming a midnight screening of The Dark Night Rises and spraying bullets into the crowd. He was the most loathed man in America, but on Tumblr, a small group of women felt something more like attraction. “I need to feel his lips pressed against mine,” one woman wrote. “His eyes are penetrating the fuck out of my soul,” wrote another. And “I know people are going to think I’m fucked up, but I bet he looked really hot in that ballistic gear.”
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| Diehard Holmies |
[22 Jul 2015|11:21pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/users/2015/07/james_holmes_fandom_years_after_the_aurora_movie_theater_shooting_holmies.html In the summer of 2012, the mug shot of the man with tangerine hair spread across the world’s televisions and computer screens. James Holmes was locked up in a Colorado jail cell on suspicion of storming a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises and spraying bullets into the crowd.* He was the most loathed man in America, but on Tumblr, a small group of women felt something more like attraction. “I need to feel his lips pressed against mine,” one woman wrote. “His eyes are penetrating the fuck out of my soul,” wrote another. And “I know people are going to think I’m fucked up, but I bet he looked really hot in that ballistic gear.”
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