@trenthead

Tag: Reading

  • Pat Dollard’s War on Hollywood

    Young Americans: The Pro-Iraq-War Documentary That Almost Became a Right-Wing Rallying Cry

    After Pat Dollard’s life started falling apart, he went to Iraq and filmed a pro-war documentary while embedded with the Marines, leading some to call him the anti–Michael Moore.

    via Vanity Fair: http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2007/03/dollard200703

    These are the companies that have presented themselves as hip, huge, harmless . . . In fact, they are ruthless and as hungry for profit . . . They’re shark-like. Just eat up everything, take all of the world’s creations. Digitize them and offer them back to humanity either for free or for an incredibly low price. And don’t pay, or massively underpay the creators, and just kick back and put your feet up, and know that if Greg from Deerhoof doesn’t like it, well that’s fine, because there are a million other people lined up behind Greg who are perfectly happy to volunteer their music to exactly such a scheme in hopes of doing something besides being a barista their whole life.

  • The Making of an American Nazi

    The Making of an American Nazi

    The Making of an American Nazi

    How did Andrew Anglin go from being an antiracist vegan to the alt-right’s most vicious troll and propagandist—and how might he be stopped?

    via The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/12/the-making-of-an-american-nazi/544119/

    We took the children over to Father’s house so they could be tended by his many childless wives.

  • How the U.S. Triggered a Massacre in Mexico

    How the U.S. Triggered a Massacre in Mexico

    How the U.S. Triggered a Massacre in Mexico

    The inside story of a cartel’s deadly assault on a Mexican town near the Texas border — and the U.S. drug operation that sparked it.

    via ProPublica: https://www.propublica.org/article/allende-zetas-cartel-massacre-and-the-us-dea

    Assange’s position was rife with ironies. An unwavering advocate of full, unfettered disclosure of primary-source material, Assange was now seeking to keep highly sensitive information from reaching a broader audience. He had become the victim of his own methods: someone at WikiLeaks, where there was no shortage of disgruntled volunteers, had leaked the last big segment of the documents, and they ended up at The Guardian in such a way that the paper was released from its previous agreement with Assange—that The Guardian would publish its stories only when Assange gave his permission. Enraged that he had lost control, Assange unleashed his threat, arguing that he owned the information and had a financial interest in how and when it was released.

  • The Concussion Diaries: One High School Football Player’s Secret Struggle with CTE

    The Concussion Diaries: One High School Football Player’s Secret Struggle with CTE

    The Concussion Diaries: One High School Football Player’s Secret Struggle with CTE

    Zac Easter knew what was happening. That CTE could attack more than just NFL pros. So he decided to write it all down—to let the world know what football had done to his body and his brain. And then he shot himself.

    via GQ: https://www.gq.com/story/the-concussion-diaries-high-school-football-cte

    Zac Easter knew what was happening to him. He knew why. And he knew that it was only going to get worse. So he decided to write it all down—to let the world know what football had done to him, what he’d done to his body and his brain for the game he loved. And then he shot himself.

  • The Fighter

    The Fighter (Published 2016)

    The Marine Corps taught Sam Siatta how to shoot. The war in Afghanistan taught him how to kill. Nobody taught him how to come home.

    Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/28/magazine/afghanistan-soldier-ptsd-the-fighter.html

    The Marine Corps taught Sam Siatta how to shoot. The war in Afghanistan taught him how to kill. Nobody taught him how to come home

  • A psychoanalytic reading of social media and the death drive – Max Read – Bookforum Magazine

    https://www.bookforum.com/print/2703/a-psychoanalytic-reading-of-social-media-and-the-death-drive-24171

    The main purpose of social media is to call attention to yourself, and it was hard to think of a worse time to be doing so. It wasn’t like you were going to get a job thanks to a particularly incisive quote-tweet of President Trump; in the midst of a lockdown, your chances of getting laid based on your Instagram Story thirst traps plummeted. The already paltry rewards of posting disappeared, while the risks skyrocketed. And yet: people kept on going. Founders and executives at companies with “empowerment” brands posted vague bromides about social justice to their Instagram Stories, unwittingly calling attention to systemic racism and sexism at the companies they oversaw. An editor I vaguely know posted his salary and was swiftly accused of acting like a creep to women he’d worked with; a writer at the New York Times took to Twitter in the middle of a fraught meeting to condescendingly castigate her peers, thereby alienating herself from her workplace to the point of resignation. A student at Brown tweeted a long, excoriating list of the scions of wealth and privilege who had matriculated alongside her, and then capped it off by revealing that her mother is the president of ExxonMobil Chemical—like an aristocrat rushing to the front of a crowd of sans-culottes, shouting “don’t forget about me!”

  • Everyone Knows It’s True – The Atlantic

    https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/09/everyone-knows-its-true/616138/

    In June 2017, Sergeant Dillon Baldridge and two other soldiers were killed in Afghanistan. Trump called the Baldridge family. On the call, Baldridge’s father, Chris, complained about the slowness of military survivor benefits. To which Trump replied, “I’m going to write you a check out of my personal account for $25,000.” The promised check, of course, never arrived. Three months later, the elder Baldridge told his story to The Washington Post. “I could not believe he was saying that, and I wish I had it recorded because the man did say this. He said, ‘No other president has ever done something like this,’ but he said, ‘I’m going to do it.’”

  • The Gambler Who Cracked the Horse-Racing Code

    The Gambler Who Cracked the Horse-Racing Code

    [contentcards url=”https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-05-03/the-gambler-who-cracked-the-horse-racing-code”]

  • What Happens When the Government Uses Facebook as a Weapon?

    What Happens When the Government Uses Facebook as a Weapon?

    [contentcards url=”https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-12-07/how-rodrigo-duterte-turned-facebook-into-a-weapon-with-a-little-help-from-facebook”]