Category: You Should See This
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How a Script Doctor Found His Own Voice | The New Yorker
How a Script Doctor Found His Own Voice
For decades, Scott Frank earned up to three hundred thousand dollars a week rewriting other people’s screenplays—from “Saving Private Ryan” to “The Ring.” Finally, he decided to stop playing ventriloquist.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/01/01/how-a-script-doctor-found-his-own-voice
“Part of the exercise was getting all these other voices out of my head—all these people I liked collaborating with,” Frank said. “I wanted to just write for myself.” Perhaps most consequentially, he decided to stop doing rewrite jobs. “My identity for so long was defined by a lack of self-confidence in my own ideas,” he told me. “Pleasing others seemed like a perfectly reasonable thing to organize my art around. Until it wasn’t.”
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/01/01/how-a-script-doctor-found-his-own-voice
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Inside the Troll Army Waging Trump’s Online Campaign – The New York Times
Inside the Troll Army Waging Trump’s Online Campaign
A team of meme-makers has been flooding social media with pro-Trump posts riddled with sexist and racist tropes. Donald Trump is cheering them on.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/13/us/politics/trump-meme-trolls-2024.html
Their most vulgar invectives are often aimed at women, particularly those seen as enemies of Mr. Trump. In one video, the former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley’s face is pasted on the body of a nearly naked woman, who kicks a man with the face of Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida in the groin. Another depicts Casey DeSantis, the governor’s wife, as a porn star. Women with ties to Mr. DeSantis are often shown with red knees, suggesting they have performed a sex act.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/13/us/politics/trump-meme-trolls-2024.html
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The Global Ambitions of Invader’s Street Art | The New Yorker
The Global Ambitions of Invader’s Street Art
At any given moment, millions of people are attending his expositions, knowingly or not.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/12/18/invader-artist-profile
For twenty-seven years, Invader has been decorating the walls, bridges, monuments, tunnels, sidewalks, staircases, railings, gates, curbs, benches, bollards, posts, poles, pipes, columns, fountains, pools, docks, seawalls, roofs, chimneys, medians, bus stops, train stations, storefronts, bookshops, and bars of Paris and beyond with playful mosaics. They have depicted everything from winged insects to cartoon characters and slot-machine fruits. Invader calls his interventions “invasions,” and the mosaics themselves are known as “invaders.” He has executed more than four thousand in a hundred and seventy-two cities in thirty-two countries, grazing permanence in the traditionally ephemeral world of street art.
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Michael Stipe Is Writing His Next Act. Slowly. – The New York Times
Michael Stipe Is Writing His Next Act. Slowly.
How do you reinvent yourself after being a global superstar? The former R.E.M. frontman is still figuring that out.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/03/magazine/michael-stipe-solo-album.html
When he wasn’t racing in circles, he was daydreaming. All his life, thoughts, feelings and sensory information have coursed through him at gale force. His attention is perpetually whipsawing elsewhere or vaporizing entirely. He will say, over dinner, “I’m sorry, but the clavinet took me completely out of the conversation,” when a clavinet suddenly enters the restaurant’s background music. He will say — laughing at himself, after you ask about his difficulty concentrating — “You’re not going to believe this, but ask me again because my mind wandered in the middle of the question.”
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Death of a (Really Good) Salesman
It was like a punch to the gut. Janet walked into the study of their Chicago-area home to use the computer. Steve’s usual mess was sitting on the desk, and she started to sort through it. Soon she was staring at a court document incontrovertibly showing the unthinkable
https://www.trulyadventure.us/death-of-a-really-good-salesman/?src=longreads
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What Happens to a School Shooter’s Sister? | The New Yorker
What Happens to a School Shooter’s Sister?
Jennifer Gonnerman speaks to Kristin Kinkel, whose brother, Kip, killed their parents and opened fire at their high school. Today, Kristin is close with Kip—and still reckoning with his crimes.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/12/04/what-happens-to-a-school-shooters-sister
I was surprised by her willingness to be so candid with a stranger. It seemed that part of her decision to speak with me had to do with timing—this year marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of her brother’s crimes. In the past, she had worried that anything she said publicly might bring more pain to the families of the students Kip had shot, but now that a quarter century had passed she hoped this was less likely. I also sensed that her decision to tell her story was driven in large part by a desire to help her brother. He remains in prison, but they are still in close contact. “The thing you heard a few minutes ago”—a beep on the phone line—“was him trying to call,” she said.
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What a Bloody San Francisco Street Brawl Tells Us About the Age of Citizen Surveillance | WIRED
What a Bloody San Francisco Street Brawl Tells Us About the Age of Citizen Surveillance
When a homeless man attacked a former city official, footage of the onslaught became a rallying cry. Then came another video, and another—and the story turned inside out.
via WIRED: https://www.wired.com/story/san-francisco-doom-loop-citizen-surveillance/
JUST WHEN THE people of San Francisco thought they’d seen every video—the sidewalk drug runners, the Louis Vuitton mob heisters, the men selling stolen laptops, the smash-and-grabbers snatching a camera from a Prius in traffic, the porch pirates porch pirates porch pirates into infinity, all indexed in the “Lawless San Francisco” section of the great internet video store—yes, just then: Stig Strombeck took out his cell phone camera on April 5 and hit Record.
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Russia Arrests Pussy Riot’s Nadya Tolokonnikova in Absentia
Russia Arrests Pussy Riot’s Nadya Tolokonnikova in Absentia
The artist faces an immediate two-month detention if she returns to her home country.
via Hyperallergic: http://hyperallergic.com/858071/russia-arrests-pussy-riot-nadya-tolokonnikova-in-absentia/
Russian artist Nadya Tolokonnikova, co-founder of the feminist art collective Pussy Riot, was arrested in absentia in Moscow yesterday, November 21, on the charge of “insulting the religious feelings of believers.” Tolokonnikova, who currently lives outside of Russia, faces an immediate two-month detention if she returns to her home country.
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A Hedge-Fund Founder’s Obsessive Storytelling | The New Yorker
A Hedge-Fund Founder’s Obsessive Storytelling
A new book about Ray Dalio, the founder of Bridgewater Associates, paints an unflattering picture—but it’s hard to imagine a record more damning than the one Dalio has created himself.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/a-hedge-fund-founders-obsessive-storytelling
Dalio’s inquisitions, in Copeland’s telling, could get overtly cruel. He once berated a top deputy—a woman so impassive and glacial she was nicknamed the Ice Queen—until she broke down into what Copeland describes as “animalistic sobbing.” (The woman did not respond to The New Yorker’s request for comment.) The subsequent training video, titled “Pain + Reflection = Progress,” became required viewing for job candidates
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From Pixels to Punches: Geolocating a neo-Nazi and White Nationalist Combat Event in Los Angeles – bellingcat
From Pixels to Punches: Geolocating a neo-Nazi and White Nationalist Combat Event in Los Angeles – bellingcat
Chapters of an emerging white nationalist network from across the United States participated in a joint combat sports event in the Los Angeles area this August, according to open source evidence geolocated by Bellingcat.
via bellingcat: https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2023/11/16/from-pixels-to-punches-geolocating-a-neo-nazi-and-white-nationalist-combat-event-in-los-angeles/
Several Active Clubs, which experts say form a dangerous bedrock for far-right activity and recruitment, joined the second annual tournament alongside extremist groups like Patriot Front and the Hammerskins. Active Clubs are a network of white nationalist mixed martial arts crews inspired by the Rise Above Movement, a now-defunct militant streetfighting group whose neo-Nazi cofounder Robert Rundo is currently in jail awaiting trial on federal rioting charges. They focus on training their members in combat skills in order to prepare them to fight against their purported enemies.
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A Day in the Life of the Guy Who Harassed You on a Dating App | The New Yorker
A Day in the Life of the Guy Who Harassed You on a Dating App
At 12:10 P.M., I ate my meat-only Chipotle bowl alone.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/a-day-in-the-life-of-the-guy-who-harassed-you-on-a-dating-app
I eat my meat-only Chipotle bowl alone.
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No Human Being Can Exist | Online Only | n+1 | Saree Makdisi
No Human Being Can Exist | Saree Makdisi
What we are not allowed to say, as Palestinians speaking to the Western media, is that all life is equally valuable. That no event takes place in a vacuum. That history didn’t start on October 7, 2023, and if you place what’s happening in the wider historical context of colonialism and anticolonial resistance, what’s most remarkable is that anyone in 2023 should be still surprised that conditions of absolute violence, domination, suffocation, and control produce appalling violence in turn.
via n+1: https://www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/no-human-being-can-exist/
His white interviewers posed all the usual questions: Can you defend what we’ve seen from Hamas militants? How has the Palestinian cause been helped by this violence? How can anyone defend the slaughter of young music lovers at a music festival? Do you defend Hamas? They probably expected a defensive reaction from him, but calmly, in his smooth Australian-accented English, my friend had already turned the interview on its head. “I want to know why I’m here today, and why I haven’t been here for the past year,” he said gently
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Inside the Israeli Crackdown on Speech | The New Yorker
Inside the Israeli Crackdown on Speech
Since the October 7th attack, Palestinians and peace activists in Israel have increasingly been targeted by employers, universities, government authorities, and right-wing mobs.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-human-rights/inside-the-israeli-crackdown-on-speech
When Frey tried to check if there was anyone outside his apartment door, he discovered that someone had blocked the viewfinder. The sounds in the street were getting louder. He could hear people shouting “traitor.” They seemed to be hurling firecrackers at the building. He rushed his wife and two children, aged eight and thirteen, out of the living room, which has a large window, and frantically texted friends: “People are attacking my house. Please come and do something.”
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The Kingpin Who Kidnapped Migrants for Ransom | The New Yorker
The Kingpin Who Kidnapped Migrants for Ransom
An Eritrean trafficker promised to help Africans desperate to reach Europe—then brutalized them inside a Libyan compound while extorting their families back home. With his fortune, he partied in Dubai.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/11/13/the-kingpin-who-kidnapped-migrants-for-ransom
The boss warned his captives, “It’s going to cost me about ten dinars”—seven dollars—“to kill you.” This was the price of a muslin sheet that the guards used to wrap corpses before burying them in the desert.
The boss was one of the most notorious human traffickers in Africa. He was known universally by his first name: Kidane.
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A Secret War, Strange New Wounds and Silence From the Pentagon – The New York Times
A Secret War, Strange New Wounds and Silence From the Pentagon
Many U.S. troops who fired vast numbers of artillery rounds against the Islamic State developed mysterious, life-shattering mental and physical problems. But the military struggled to understand what was wrong.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/05/us/us-army-marines-artillery-isis-pentagon.html
More than half the Marines in the battery had eventually received diagnoses of traumatic brain injuries, according to a briefing prepared for Marine Corps headquarters. The report warned that the experience in Syria showed that firing a high number of rounds, day after day, could incapacitate crews “faster than combat replacements can be trained to replace them.”
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In the Middle East, Despair Is Not an Option | The New Yorker
In the Middle East, Despair Is Not an Option
A source of inspiration is that era of history, not so distant, when leaders and movements, for all their flaws and failures, agreed to agree.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/11/13/israel-gaza-hamas-war
In an era of darkness and blood, it is nearly impossible to remember that, from Moscow to Jerusalem, there was once
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Not All of America’s National-Security Threats Are Overseas | The New Yorker
Not All of America’s National-Security Threats Are Overseas
Congress’s foreign-aid follies with Israel and Ukraine, and the fear of Trump in 2024.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-bidens-washington/not-all-of-americas-national-security-threats-are-overseas
Nine days ago, the idea that an obscure 2020 election denier from Shreveport, Louisiana, with less than five thousand dollars in his household’s bank accounts, a literalist’s belief in the presence of dinosaurs on Noah’s Ark, and a dubious past as an advocate of “conversion” therapy for gay teens could single-handedly shape the fate of tens of billions of dollars in U.S. military assistance to key allies at war was even more preposterous than the notion that America might soon reëlect its four-times-indicted former President.
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A Russian Journalist’s Pained Love for Her Country | The New Yorker
A Russian Journalist’s Pained Love for Her Country
In a new book, Elena Kostyuchenko attempts to work through how she missed—or, rather, failed to adequately react to—Russia’s descent into fascism.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/persons-of-interest/a-russian-journalists-pained-love-for-her-country
The paper for which Kostyuchenko most dreamed of working was Novaya Gazeta, where Anna Politkovskaya, a fearless and revered reporter, filed dispatches telling the grim truth of the Russian war in Chechnya. Kostyuchenko describes the sensation of encountering Politkovskaya’s articles. “I’d feel like I was getting a fever,” she writes. “It turned out I didn’t know anything about my country.”