Jamil Smith on the past and future of race coverage in the United States (Jamil Smith is great):
As the number of black journalists in newsrooms inched up in the 1990s, the number of formal race beats declined. Racial coverage began to migrate to media organizations and websites that covered it full time. Colorlines, a racial justice magazine, launched in 1998. Racialicious, a blog that examines the intersection of race and pop culture, started in 2006. The next year, PostBourgie began publishing, and served as a launching pad for celebrated black journalists, like Jamelle Bouie of Slate and Shani O. Hilton, executive editor of BuzzFeed News. In 2008, comedian Elon James White debuted This Week in Blackness, which features podcasts, video series, and a news blog. These sites don’t bring in corporate dollars like Vox or FiveThirtyEight, but they have survived and even thrived by concentrating their coverage on issues affecting people of color, and by providing opportunities for writers to write on these subjects with a frankness rarely seen in mainstream publications.
KIND OF A PROBLEM for MMA that Ronda Rousey is too good at it, tbqh. I think she’s a real jerk about Fallon Fox, though.
for 4 years ive had to make do w/ what passes for men in this place. w/ their untucked shirts, boneless faces, their stars both wars & trek
— every 30 Rock insult (@30rock_insults) March 3, 2015
Fascinating reported piece on race, terrorism, and how the French police responded to the Charlie Hebdo attack:
Part of Christophe’s standard training was learning that though a cop could shoot a civilian in legitimate defense, he couldn’t shoot excessively—and that he could still get fired, anyway. The politics and the culture of France did not stand behind a policeman who killed, cadets and officers were warned. But the GIGN got a different message: In training, instructors told stories about the time they had to put 11 bullets in a guy. “If you shoot someone just in the leg who has a gun,” Theo was cautioned in one of their classes, “he’ll kill you.”
A few years ago, someone asked how it came about that I ended up living with Doris Lessing in my teens. I was in the middle of the story of the to-ing and fro-ing between my parents and was finally reaching the psychiatric hospital bit when the man said something extraordinary, something that had never occurred to me or to anyone else to whom I’d told the story.
‘Why didn’t you just do what you were told?’ he asked.
Lydia Kiesling on Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant:
At some moments, I felt I had found an apocryphal eighth Chronicle of Narnia, written by a particularly cheerless, possibly aphasic disciple of C.S. Lewis. While Ishiguro’s “turn to fantasy” has been compared to J.R.R. Tolkien and, heaven forfend, George R.R. Martin, the Christian allegory and honor-bound Britishness of Lewis is where I think the novel is more at home. If you remember Eustace Scrubb and Jill Poole and Puddleglum making their way across the terrible moor and through the ruined giant city, you’re there with Beatrice and Axl as they struggle across the Great Plain where the giant lies buried, always on the lookout for enchantments. Even the narrative perspective nods, intentionally or no, to Lewis, in its occasional breaks to address the reader, breaks that are just enough to remind you that you aren’t alone in the room. The third-person omniscient narrator Ishiguro employs for much of the novel places the reader in time in much the same way that Lewis’s did: “Once inside it, you would not have thought this longhouse so different from the sort of rustic canteen many of you will have experienced in one institution or another.” Compare to Lewis’s friendly signposts: “You have never seen such clothes, but I can remember them,” or “They came out on one of those rough roads (we should hardly call them roads at all in England)”.
Over at Millihelen, a lipstick love letter.
Steve: We should finish 22 Jump Street, isn’t the 24 rental period almost up?
Me: (silence)
Steve: Did…did you actually buy 22 Jump Street?
Me: (silence)
