Our weekly recap highlighting the best feature stories from around the internet.
Jia Tolentino discusses the case against contemporary feminism in this weeks New York Times Magazine. Photo: New York Times Magazine
The Case Against Contemporary Feminism, by Jia Tolentino, The New York Times Magazine
‘“Somewhere along the way toward female liberation, it was decided that the most effective method was for feminism to become universal,” Crispin writes. And the people who decided this “forgot that for something to be universally accepted, it must become as banal, as non-threatening and ineffective as possible.”’
Under the Bridge, by Kirsty Johnston, The New Zealand Herald
‘“The cultural context is critical for me,” Rohs says. “Too many young Māori leave school with no qualifications. And it can’t be that young Māori are not intelligent, it can’t be they are not equal in terms of their brain power as non-Māori, it has to be factors within the education system that contribute to that sense of failure.”’
Don’t Cry For Ivanka — Fear Her, by Anne Helen Peterson, Buzzfeed
“Ivanka is highly intelligent. But part of that intelligence, that savvy for which she’s renowned, derives from knowing exactly how the system works — a system of which her father is simply the most prominent and contemporary architect. Ivanka could use her inside knowledge to dismantle that structure from within: She is, after all, literally inside the building. Instead, she’s chosen to replicate it — albeit in cuter, Instagram-ready tones.”
Elder abuse: The ugly truth, by Donna Chisholm, North and South
‘“Everyone has the same set of rights, and how you exercise them might mean you’ve got to give more to people with disabilities to ensure their rights are respected. Yes, in 99 out of 100 cases, with people just doing the right thing, you’ll get the same results as if the regulations are followed properly. But liberty, and particularly liberty for vulnerable people, is so important you need to have a bit more of a system in place to catch that one-in-100 example.”’
Tom Hiddleston is profiled this week by GQ Photo: GQ
Tom Hiddleston on Taylor Swift, Heartbreak, and Great Bolognese, by Taffy Brodesser-Akner, GQ
‘“The truth is, it was the Fourth of July and a public holiday and we were playing a game and I slipped and hurt my back. And I wanted to protect the graze from the sun and said, ’Does anyone have a T-shirt?’ And one of her friends said, ’I’ve got this.’ ” The friend pulled out the "I ♥ T.S." tank top that Taylor’s friends are contractually obligated to own. “And we all laughed about it. It was a joke.”’
In Trump's Fascist Aesthetic, Dissenters Are Losers and the Photograph Rules, by Stassa Edwards, Jezebel
“The degradation of objective reality is central to the fascist aesthetic. It’s not that facts are not real or do not exist, it’s simply that they’re unstable and in need of constant interpretation—like a Riefenstahl film, alternative facts are a fiction that poses as truth. Who better to interpret them then Trump, a man, as Conway has said, that is singular in both vision and action. With politics reduced to aesthetic expression, the ownership of truth belongs to a willful individual.”
Did I Get James Baldwin Wrong?, by Stephen Casmier, NPR
“Because of him, I rejected the easy comfort, the endlessly shopping, touristic gaze of superior identity that the other exchange students embraced. He widely critiqued all forms of oppression, forging, perhaps, the foundation of a new order, a new identity, a new consciousness. This was the hope I saw in Jimmy Baldwin. But James Baldwin, the man I saw on the screen as I watched I Am Not Your Negro,had little of that hope.”
