Here are some articles that I read and enjoyed. The top two ones shocked me because I've had faith in The Intercept.
Laura Poiras, 'Open Letter'
On Monday, November 30, 2020, I was fired from First Look Media, an organization I co-founded. My termination came two months after I spoke to the press about The Intercept’s failure to protect whistleblower Reality Winner and the cover-up and lack of accountability that followed, and after years of raising concerns internally about patterns of discrimination and retaliation. I was told my firing was effective immediately and without cause, my access to email was shut down, and that the company had no plans to communicate my abrupt termination to the public.
https://web.archive.org/web/20210118131636/https://www.praxisfilms.org/open-letter-from-laura-poitras/
Glenn Greenwald, 'Emails With Intercept Editors Showing Censorship of My Joe Biden Article'
I have been extremely disenchanted and saddened by the editorial direction of The Intercept under its New York leadership for quite some time. The publication we founded without those editors back in 2014 now bears absolutely no resemblance to what we set out to build -- not in content, structure, editorial mission or purpose. I have grown embarrassed to have my name used as a fund-raising tool to support what it is doing and for editors to use me as shield to hide behind to avoid taking responsibility for their mistakes (including, but not only, with the Reality Winner debacle, which I was publicly blamed despite having no role in it, while the editors who actually were responsible for those mistakes stood by silently, allowing me to be blamed for their errors and then covering-up any public accounting of what happened, knowing that such transparency would expose their own culpability).
Greenwald, Glenn. 2020. “Emails With Intercept Editors Showing Censorship Of My Joe Biden Article.” October 29, 2020. https://web.archive.org/web/20210118121919/https://greenwald.substack.com/p/emails-with-intercept-editors-showing
Rebecca Pierce, 'White Savior Cinema
The much-anticipated Christmas Day release of Wonder Woman: 1984 was met with immediate controversy over its depiction of Arabs and the Middle East. Much of the online criticism of the film centers around its depictions of an Egyptian Emir and an Arab terrorist trying to obtain nuclear weapons, as well as scenes that many viewers felt shared jarring resonances with the violence Palestinians face under Israeli occupation. One scene drew particular ire: Wonder Woman lassoes a rocket to protect four Arab children playing soccer, which many felt was reminiscent of the high-profile killing of four boys from the same family who were playing soccer on a beach during the 2014 Israeli bombing of Gaza. This was all the more loaded given previous controversies over Wonder Woman star and co-producer Gal Gadot’s role as an IDF training officer during the 2006 Lebanon War, and a Facebook post she made in support of the IDF during the war in which the boys were killed.
Pierce, Rebecca. 2021. “White Savior Cinema.” Jewish Currents. January 8, 2021. https://web.archive.org/web/20210118122234/https://jewishcurrents.org/white-savior-cinema/
Laura Marsh, 'Infinite Jerk'
Adrienne Miller’s memoir of her relationship with David Foster Wallace is part of an emerging genre of women coming of age via an older, powerful man.
Marsh, Laura. 2020. “Infinite Jerk.” The New Republic. February 12, 2020. https://web.archive.org/web/20210118123428/https://newrepublic.com/article/156550/infinite-jerk
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The most enjoyable quality of the book is its relentless cataloging of Wallace’s inventively awful behavior, and of Miller’s efforts to withstand the onslaught. That Wallace was not a great guy is no surprise, but a lot of the detail here is fresh, since Miller doesn’t appear in D.T. Max’s life of Wallace, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story.
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Once Miller accepts his story “Adult World” for the magazine, he seizes on the connection as an excuse to call her about anything and everything. When she asks him why he is contacting her so much, he answers creepily that he sees her as “blood in the water for a shark.” He portrays himself as juvenile and helpless, a savant so incapable of caring for himself that an old woman prepares and delivers his meals each week. When he walks his dogs, named Drone and Cancer, they pee outside, and he pees with them; he also pees while on the phone to Miller and is surprised when she can hear him. He refers to his typos as “boners.”
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To be a woman close to David Foster Wallace means mattering not as a specific human but as a convenient peg for a set of his ideas. How real or imagined you are isn’t particularly important, and you will be extravagantly messed with along the way.
Ira Wells, 'The Professor of Piffle: The dangerous underside of Jordan Peterson’s crusade against the humanities'
To fully grasp the depth of Peterson’s belief in power hierarchies, take his commitment to IQ testing: “If you don’t buy IQ research,” he has told his students, “then you might as well throw away all of psychology.” Peterson rejects the theory of multiple intelligences (emotional intelligence, musical intelligence, and so on) and insists that all of human intelligence is biologically determined, essentially unalterable, and expressed in a single number that can be ranked. Your IQ, he says, will govern where you end up in life: with an IQ of 130, you can be an attorney or an editor; at 115, you can be a nurse or a sales manager; at 100, you can be a receptionist or a police officer; at 90, you can be a janitor. Peterson’s defence of IQ rests on shaky foundations. While he tells students that IQ was empirically established through Charles Spearman’s factor analysis, he does not share the well-known critique of that method: factor analysis supports both of the contradictory causal explanations of intelligence (intelligence as innate versus intelligence as the product of environmental advantage). Peterson then stacks the deck in favour of biology, citing brain size and neural conduction velocity (essentially, the speed at which an electrical pulse moves through tissue) as the determinants of IQ. Again, he does not tell students that both explanations were discredited by later research.
Wells, Ira. 2017. “The Professor Of Piffle | The Walrus.” The Walrus. November 27, 2017. https://web.archive.org/web/20210118130338/https://thewalrus.ca/the-professor-of-piffle/
Gabriel Byrne Talks Memory, Loneliness And More With Karl Geary
I always remember that image of Joyce writing Ulysses in Trieste, on the back of a suitcase and Nora sweeping under him, saying, “you lift up your legs Jim.” I don’t know why that image stays in my head. [Laughs]
In the book, I do acknowledge the fact that I have experienced loneliness in varying degrees, the loneliness of being out of step sometimes with everybody else and not feeling that I had anything in common, that I was other than, not in that Byronic haughty way, but just that I never felt that I fit it in. I don’t know where that came from. I don’t know if that’s something that’s common to a great many people who express themselves artistically.
There is that Susan Sontag quote, “A landscape of devastation is still a landscape, there’s beauty in ruins.”
Geary, Karl. 2021. “Gabriel Byrne Talks Memory, Loneliness And More With Karl Geary.” Literary Hub. January 13, 2021. https://web.archive.org/web/20210118131233/https://lithub.com/gabriel-byrne-talks-memory-loneliness-and-more-with-karl-geary/
Karen Hertzberg, 'How to Give Writing Feedback That’s Constructive, Not Crushing'
Writing is a vulnerable act. And, ironically, the more experienced the writer, the more likely one may be to think they’re a complete fraud. In fact, some creatives rack up impressive achievements all while feeling certain that, at any moment, someone’s going to expose them as a poseur.
Herzberg, Karen. 2020. “How To Give Writing Feedback That’s Constructive, Not Crushing.” Grammarly. August 13, 2020. https://web.archive.org/web/20210118132021/https://www.grammarly.com/blog/how-to-give-constructive-feedback-on-writing/
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Give the manuscript a thoughtful read-through (or two) before you give feedback. The writer is in a vulnerable position. You owe it to this person to prove that you’ve invested more than a quick glance and offered a snap judgment. Don’t skim. Read deeply. Take notes.
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Feedback is really about the quality of your suggestions, not the quantity. If the writer’s work needs proofreading, suggest a thorough line edit rather than picking at every little grammar, spelling, and punctuation nit. If passive voice or weak language choices are a theme, recommend that the writer take a closer look at those things.
Sian Cain, 'Amazon.com and 'Big Five' publishers accused of ebook price-fixing'
Amazon.com and the “Big Five” publishers – Penguin Random House, Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan and Simon & Schuster – have been accused of colluding to fix ebook prices, in a class action filed by the law firm that successfully sued Apple and the Big Five on the same charge 10 years ago.The lawsuit, filed in district court in New York on Thursday by Seattle firm Hagens Berman, on behalf of consumers in several US states, names the retail giant as the sole defendant but labels the publishers “co-conspirators”. It alleges Amazon and the publishers use a clause known as “Most Favored Nations” (MFN) to keep ebook prices artificially high, by agreeing to price restraints that force consumers to pay more for ebooks purchased on retail platforms that are not Amazon.com.
Cain, Sian. 2021. “Amazon.Com And ‘Big Five’ Publishers Accused Of Ebook Price-Fixing.” The Guardian. January 15, 2021. https://web.archive.org/web/20210118132224/https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/jan/15/amazoncom-and-big-five-publishers-accused-of-ebook-price-fixing
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Hagens Berman sued Apple and the Big Five publishers for fixing ebook prices in 2011, in a case that would eventually lead to suits from several US states and the Department of Justice, which accused Apple of colluding in order to break up Amazon.com’s dominance in the ebook market.In that case, the five publishers settled for $166m (£120m), while Apple lost at trial and was order to pay out $450m in 2016, after a lengthy legal process that ended when the US supreme court declined to hear the company’s challenge.
Posted from my blog with SteemPress : https://niklasblog.com/?p=25706