Tag / Trump

by Nerdy Spice

Links We Loved This Week — 6/16/17

Do you know about the creepy surrealist Youtube star Poppy? This article about her is fascinating, but what really fascinated me was just watching her “I’m Poppy” video. (via Wired)

After some anxious sponsors backed away from the notorious Trumpian production of Julius Caesar, Alexandra Petri for the Washington Post cheekily identified reasons why pretty much no plays should be acceptable to sponsors. For example, in As You Like It, “Woman wandering in the woods to get away from the current regime is portrayed as some sort of hero.” VERY inappropriate.

Rebecca Solnit argues in Harper’s that the mythical Cassandra is the feminine inverse of The Boy Who Cried Wolf: from Anita Hill to Cosby’s victims to Trump’s accusers and in countless other examples, men can lie over and over again and be believed, while women can tell the truth time and time again and be dismissed.

A poet who wasn’t getting any traction on Instagram conducted a social experiment in which he posted the most banal, non-sensical lines he could think of–and he immediately got thousands and likes and followers, many of whom were not in on the joke.

The New Yorker‘s Doreen St. Felix walks us through Bill Maher’s awkward, graceless apology–and why we probably shouldn’t accept it.

by Nerdy Spice

Links We Loved This Week — 2/17/17

NYMag published what I can only call a surrealist work of art: Night-Time Voicemails From The White House.

The Good Fight is on its way! There is a generally positive review in the New York Times. We will be watching and covering it here! To answer the inevitable questions: yes, you do have to have CBS: All Access to watch it, and yes, we have it, and yes, that’s ENTIRELY because we forgot to cancel it after The Good Wife ended. Don’t judge.

Dude who directed The Arrival (which some of us may have hated) is now announced to be directing Dune (via bleedingcool.com).

We’ve been writing a little bit about a new anti-Islamophobia attitude on Homeland‘s latest season. The intrepid Bitch Magazine has a piece where they conclude that progress may not be permanent–but that they remain hopeful. Read it here.

by Nerdy Spice

Links We Loved This Week — 1/27/17

Let’s be real. There’s only one thing we’re reading about this week, and it has nothing to do with books or movies or TV. In fact, this creature we are obsessively reading about doesn’t even READ books. A fascinating specimen, isn’t he? (Just ask him!)

Here, inspired by the magic of Google’s auto-complete search box, is a giant collection of listicles: books that the world WISHES Trump would read. Taken together, it is a grand list of books about social justice, science, history, civics, logic, and morality. You know, all those niche topics that he hasn’t really had time to grasp the basics of yet.

Elle has some great, surprising choices, including one about Japanese internment camps. And who knew Ta-Nehisi Coates had written a graphic novel? Not me!

Book Riot has a list of seven, including several great books on racism and, oddly, How to Win Friends and Influence People, like, I think he’s got more influence than he deserves already, mk?

Washington Post went basic (but all strong choices), with Washington, King, and Roosevelt. And the Constitution, though we all know Trump’s not interested in THAT.

NPR went scientific, wishing that Mr. “Let’s just Build Up Our Arsenal” would educate himself on the history and science of nuclear weaponry.

The Washington Independent Review of Books has really good stuff on its list, with War and Peace alongside The Once and Future King, though it’s noticeably short on the “educate Trump about how racism is bad” thing.

Inc.com, somewhat surprisingly, put together a totally legit reading list for our fearless illiterate, including The New Jim Crow, which is amazing and was also on Book Riot’s list.

 

 

by Nerdy Spice

Links We Loved This Week — 12/10/16

“A lot of the classic, great stories were written by truly great writers. Joseph Conrad, Edgar Allen Poe, Edith Wharton, Henry James — they wrote what we would now call “genre fiction.” It got me thinking, “What happened?” When did that stop being something you could do and still be considered a serious writer?” Michael Chabon, whose novel Moonglow just came out, talks to Electric Literature about genre fiction.

American Gauntlet, a satire site, published the hilarious “Study Suggests Gilmore Girls Revival Coupled With Political Coverage to Create Wave of ‘Super Disappointment’ for Women.”

Ann M. Martin talks to The New Yorker about feminism in the Babysitter’s Club: “I still wanted to present this idea of girls who could be entrepreneurial, who ran this business successfully, even though they were not perfect.”

The NYT has an excerpt from Anna Kendrick’s book, where she discusses the making of the immortal Camp.

If you want to, you can review one Professor of Paleontology at NYU. Think he is too into his sandwiches? Think his crunchy hair is weird? Think his spray tan is kind of uneven? Share your feelings at Rate-My-Professor. “Looks a bit like this super chill dude who used to sell cookies outside the dorms a few years back… or am I confusing him with the falafel guy?”

by Nerdy Spice

Rereading Watership Down In the Age of Terrorism and Trump

Someone once asked me, if I could force everyone on earth to read one book in order to make the world a better place, what book it would be. The answer was easy, and it’s only gotten easier with time: Watership Down, Richard Adams’ epic novel about bunny rabbits (seriously), the extravagantly tattered paperback I’ve read over and over since I was nine, following a group of rabbits as they travel to a new home and found a new society. It’s purportedly for children, though Adams makes no perceptible effort to simplify his prose for younger readers; and anyway, lately it seems like Americans could use a grade-school-level lesson in civic values. Suddenly so many of us seem willing to trade away long-standing principles of democracy in exchange for a false sense of security from terrorism, or from the imaginary Mexican rapists supposedly pouring over the border. Those principles are so interwoven in the fabric of our daily life that it’s easy to take them for granted; rereading Watership Down always reminds me what a struggle it is to shape a healthy society out of chaos.

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by Nerdy Spice

All the Trump References From Gilmore Girls, Ranked By How Awkward They Sound Now

In the constant deluge of pop-culture references streaming forth from the mouths of Gilmore Girls characters, from Heathers to Two Fat Ladies to Tiger Woods, it was easy at the time to miss noticing that the Gilmores had an ongoing preoccupation with a certain someone–namely, the orange-skinned bogeyman currently stalking the halls of American politics, frightening small children with the threat of trying to date them when they turn fourteen.

But if you, like us, are going back to rewatch the seven glorious seasons of Gilmore Girls in preparation for the revival coming to Netflix on November 26th, you may have noticed that a few of those jokes are… no longer quite so funny. That’s always kind of a danger with pop culture references, but who was to know that the strutting reality star from The Apprentice and (shudder) the Miss USA pageant was soon going to be the US’s would-be first fascist dictator?

In honor of the upcoming revival and in… what’s the opposite of honor? Ignominy?… of the upcoming election, here’s a list of all five times Herr Trump was mentioned in the original Gilmore Girls, ranked in order of how the reference sounds to our sadder, wiser 2016 ears–from “slightly awkward” to “tragically cringe-inducing.”

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