REWRITING RACIST HEADLINES || The artist and media critic Alexandra Bell revises biased news coverage | The New Yorker

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Strange Victory || Leo Hurwitz | Richard Brody

Two Prescient Films About the Memory of the Holocaust by Richard Brody April 24, 2017

Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day, and Leo Hurwitz’s 1948 film, “Strange Victory” (which I discuss in this clip), makes the notion of memory its very subject. Hurwitz’s idea is simple, brilliant, and painful: he compares the systematic racism that motivated the Nazi regime, which the United States had just helped to defeat, with the systematic racism that was still in force in the United States. His subject isn’t hypocrisy or even political legitimacy; it’s states of mind. His condensed and abstracted essay-like film (which runs a mere hour and eleven minutes) shows—with a collage of archival footage and press clippings, live-action hidden-camera sequences, and even dramatic reconstructions—that the state of mind that gave rise to Germany’s persecution and attempted extermination of Europe’s Jews had also spawned, and was continuing to enable, Jim Crow laws and racial and religious discrimination in the United States.

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He’s One of Brazil’s Greatest Writers. Why Isn’t Machado de Assis More Widely Read? || The New Yorker

Illustration by Tom Bachtell

Benjamin Moser for The New Yorker

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In the broader panorama of Brazilian society, this was unremarkable. (Most Brazilians were of mixed race.) So was his class background. Most Brazilians were poor, and Machado’s origins were a step above misery. His parents were literate. They belonged to the working class rather than to the lowest class—the enslaved.

But people of visibly mixed race were rare in the higher society that Machado entered while relatively young. As a boy, he had a knack for befriending helpful people: legend has it that a priest taught him Latin; an immigrant baker, French. At seventeen, working at a printer’s shop, he met intellectuals, and was soon publishing poems.

He was, at best, an indifferent employee. He was too busy reading, and did not earn enough to allow him to eat more than once a day. Yet the work he published, plays and poetry at first, was instantly acclaimed by a small but influential circle, and his first novel, “Resurrection,” published in 1872, inaugurated a critical success that continued until his death, thirty-six years later.

Machado’s unlikely social ascent attracted comment. Those who disliked him held his origins against him: one critic, in 1897, called him a “genuine representative of the mixed Brazilian sub-race.” Even his champions couldn’t help themselves. Miguel Pereira makes nearly forty mentions of his racial background—mostly gratuitous—in the three hundred pages of her biography.

The focus on this facet of his origin story obscures other surprising facts about his life. He was born in 1839, seventeen years after Brazilian independence—and only thirty-one years after the first book was printed in Rio de Janeiro. For three hundred and eight years after the Portuguese first reached Brazil, printing was forbidden throughout the colony. An entire country was not allowed to think for itself.

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INSIDE THE GROWING FLAT EARTH MOVEMENT || Alan Burdick | The New Yorker

via Daringfireball

A map from 1893 portrays Earth as square and stationary and warns of Biblical interdiction against the notion of a round Earth flying through space.Illustration Courtesy Orlando Ferguson / L.H. Everts & Co. / Library of Congress



What a burgeoning movement says about science, solace, and how a theory becomes truth | Alan Burdick

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The unsettling thing about spending two days at a convention of people who believe that Earth is flat isn’t the possibility that you, too, might come to accept their world view, although I did worry a little about that. Rather, it’s the very real likelihood that, after sitting through hours of presentations on “scientism,” lightning angels, and nasa’s many conspiracies — the moon-landing hoax, the International Fake Station, so-called satellites — and in chatting with I.T. specialists, cops, college students, and fashionably dressed families with young children, all of them unfailingly earnest and lovely, you will come to actually understand why a growing number of people are dead certain that Earth is flat. Because that truth is unnerving.


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Stupidity is a choice, not an accident. People chose to believe in what gives them solace, cowardice branded as rightfulness.

American Buñuel || Richard Brody Reviews Jordan Peele’s Out

illustration by richie pope

NYorker:

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Peele’s perfectly tuned cast and deft camera work unleash his uproarious humor along with his political fury; with his first film, he’s already an American Buñuel.

Waking Nightmares: A Conversation with Jordan Peele || criterioncollection | By Andrew Chan:

… Get Out, a humor-laced foray into horror that wields the tools of the genre to expose racism lurking at the edges of polite, everyday interactions. Weaving together a vast network of societal ills, from racial profiling and cultural appropriation to the legacy of eugenics, the film follows a young African-American photographer named Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) on an anxiety-ridden weekend getaway with his white girlfriend (Allison Williams) to meet her parents in Upstate New York, a trip that—despite the family’s proudly flaunted liberal bona fides—takes a turn for the macabre.

The Importance of Serial Commas

WHICHCRAFT || That vs. Which | Mary Norris

via DF

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Rachel Dolezal || Black Is NOT African! Does White Mean European?

Black Like Her by Jelani Cobb:

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Our means of defining ourselves are complex and contradictory—and could be nothing other than that.

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If this does not clarify that White/Black is nothing more than a cocoon, a cocoon for us to soothe ourselves or for keeping away others …

The Daily Show
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The Groups That Rules The Web || Paul Ford

via DF:

Ford achieves something extraordinary with this piece — it works well as an introduction to the world of web standards for the uninitiated, but works also as a cogent overview for those of us who are intimately familiar with the W3C (idealistic) / WHATWG (practical) political saga.

• Paul Ford for the New Yorker