IT’S A DAY of rest, and you may be in the mood for a quiet corner and a comfy chair.
We’ve hand-picked the week’s best reads for you to savour.
Noel G isn’t a man afraid of expressing an opinion. So here’s what he thinks about everything from Tidal to same-sex marriage.
(Rolling Stone, approx 16 mins reading time, 3206 words)
I really think that the legalization of drugs — taking a long-term view of it — over 25 years probably would be a great thing because it would take the romance and the rebel element out of it for kids. But that 25-year [period] would be fuckin’ utter chaos and disaster and scandal after fuckin’ drug-addled scandal. Eventually, it would level out and probably be a good thing. But it only takes one kid to fuckin’ die and it’s just morally out of the window.
Cheap manicures are an everyday thing in New York – but the women who provide them are often working six days a week, and paid according to their race. This exposé got a lot of people talking this week.
(New York Times, approx 33 mins reading time, 6799 words)
The deal was the same as it is for beginning manicurists in almost any salon in the New York area. She would work for no wages, subsisting on meager tips, until her boss decided she was skillful enough to merit a wage. It would take nearly three months before her boss paid her. Thirty dollars a day.
Mark Ruffalo has really seen his career take off again of late. Rolling Stone meets him to chat about his big role of The Hulk. Avengers fans unite.
(Rolling Stone, approx 23 mins reading time, 4673 words)
On the surface, the chilled-out Ruffalo, heavy and sincere user of the word “buddy,” seems a poor temperamental match for a living embodiment of rage, a walking, leaping id. The only vocation he seriously considered besides acting was “soul surfer,” where he’d build his life around wave-riding without the bummer of competition. Truth is, though, he knows plenty about anger, frustration and grief.
In the wake of a string of deaths of young African Americans, three Black American women started the #blacklivesmatter movement. Here, they explain what it’s all about.
(The California Sunday Magazine, approx 8 mins reading time, 1646 words)
“I was sad, I was angry, I was rageful,” she says. “I have a brother who’s 25, and he’s 6 feet tall and lives in a majority-white community. It could have been him.” Still in the bar, Garza posted what she describes as a “love letter to black folks” on Facebook. She wrote that their murder should always come as a shock, and she would not let the state numb that for her. She ended with this: “Black people. I love you. I love us. Our lives matter.”
5. The real life of the Kardashians
This utterly absorbing – and totally bizarre – profile of Kris Jenner, matriarch of the Kardashians, is an incredible read.
(New York Times, approx 24 mins reading time, 4851 words)
On the 18th-century Italian table in the foyer of Kris Jenner’s house lay a pile of nondisclosure agreements, ready for anyone who enters to sign. On the floor was a small framed sign that states: “What we say here, what we see here, let it stay here, when we leave here.” Cameras, however, have been installed in the ceiling above. At any given moment, there are one or two cameras on some combination of Kardashians and Jenners.
US comdedian Amy Schumer is the feminist hero we’ve all been waiting for. The ace wrter Emily Nussbaum on why she’s so fantastic.
(The New Yorker, approx 10 mins reading time, 1899 words)
…the girl whom Schumer satirizes in her sketches, in many permutations, is brutally clueless. She’s the subject of every op-ed on “girls today”—a needy narcissist, all bravado and entitlement. This Amy is the “dumb slut” and the “whiny white girl.” … She’s the type that a friend of mine once nicknamed the Whoo! Girl—we’d see her at Coyote Ugly with her posse, yelling “Whoo!,” fake-twerking, then weeping at 3 AM.
…AND A CLASSIC FROM THE ARCHIVES…
In 2014, Maureen O’Connor looked at ‘ethnic plastic surgery’.
(New York Magazine, approx reading time, words)
And doctors comfortable advertising their expertise in ethnic plastic surgery are growing wealthy creasing Asian eyelids, pushing sloped foreheads forward, and pulling prominent mouths back. These are procedures outsiders generally view as deracinating processes, sharpening the stereotypically flat noses of Asians, blacks, and Latinos while flattening the stereotypically sharp noses of Arabs and Jews
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
have your say