The Baffler

If you’re not up on your Oscar-nominated films, use A.S. Hamrah’s rundown to cram so you can tell one white nominee from another.

“But the fire will outlive them all, and me. It will outlive my grandchildren and perhaps the human species. It has been burning for so long that it’s possible to forget that it started at the town dump. Centralia is the site of a disaster that sounds too stupid to be real, a trash fire that will inherit the earth.”

Barry Yeoman, a man with a lifelong stutter, suggests that while society mostly views a stutter as a disability, stammering really isn’t the problem at all. The real problem that needs to be cured is the assumption that those who stutter are somehow deficient.

“Classical musicianship is better understood as a job, a shitty job.”

As Niela Orr looks at Black women characters in horror films like “Us,” “Ghost,” “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane,” and “Scream,” she uncovers a throughline: “Black women have been humiliated and punished, in horror cinema as in life, for our incisiveness, for wondering aloud, for trying to get some answers.”

“The idea seems to be that we all live in the great database in the sky, occasionally summoning aliens with our minds.” Emily Harnett explores Silicon Valley’s appropriation of UFO culture.

“People don’t necessarily revolt when things are bad, but they might when things aren’t getting better, or are getting demonstrably worse.”

“For the hardcore enthusiast, with the software and the charts, astrology seemed at most an intricate hobby, convertible to modest profit at only the highest level, like translating Scandinavian languages or freelance writing.”

If there’s one clear moral to adduce from the horrifically prostrate coverage of the Trump movement’s white-nationalist profile in the mainstream press, it’s that the white-dominated media simply doesn’t care about changing in any meaningful way.