Weekend Reading

  • My Name Is Paul, And I Don’t Have Depression
    Before I start, let me paint you a picture of my Dad. Imagine you are looking at a newspaper clipping of a workers strike from the 1970’s. My dad is the third guy on the left. In his prime he worked three jobs, seven days a week. Monday to Friday he would work 6.30am – 6pm as a factory foreman.
    Touching article, proof you never know how mental health might kick in
  • Winners of the 2016 World Press Photo Contest
    The winning entries of the 59th annual World Press Photo Contest ​have just been announced. The 2016 Photo of the Year is a haunting nighttime image of refugees climbing through razor wire over the the Hungarian-Serbian border, taken by photographer Warren Richardson.
    Stunning. Simply stunning.
  • My Autistic Brother’s Quest for Love
    I am woken by a loud commotion. It’s 1996, and I’m ten years old, two years older than my brother, Randy. He is banging on the wall our rooms share—BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!—and screaming, “I’M SO STUPID! I WANT TO DIE!” Our mother, Feryn, runs into his room and I follow close behind.
    The strength of the human spirit can make amazing things happen
  • What Should We Say About David Bowie and Lori Maddox?
    David Bowie died on January 10, 2016, two days after his 69th birthday and the release of Blackstar, his 25th album. The news came meteorically; we were dazed and flattened, looking at the world through debris and glitter that suddenly it seemed we’d borrowed from him.
    Hard to read, but an interesting take on how ‘celebrity’ can morph views.
  • Will Deadpool’s Sequel Introduce Hollywood’s First Openly Queer Superhero?
    Deadpool does what a lot of superheroes do. He battles bad guys, he’s essentially indestructible, and he wears an insanely tight spandex suit.
    Fuck Yeah Deadpool!!
  • Why This Radical Leftist is Disillusioned by Leftist Culture
    I will always believe in “The Revolution”. But I am becoming very frustrated with modern “activist” culture.
    I HEART THIS! Or I smiley face it? Dammit, what’s the right emoji?
  • The Madness of Airline Élite Status
    When you fly a lot for work, as I do, you check your frequent-flier mile balance often, to provide data for competitive commiseration. “Eighteen flights this year already, fourteen hotel nights in eleven different hotels,” a friend e-mailed me, in victory, earlier this month.
    Putting aside the carbon impact on the planet, this is utterly bonkers. Humans fascinate me in so many ways.
  • The National Portrait Gallery now has a painting of Frank Underwood
    Kevin Spacey’s Frank Underwood is only the fictional president in Netflix’s House of Cards, but it increasingly feels like the pretend politician is bleeding through into the real world.
    MARCH 4TH NEW SEASON. I REPEAT, MARCH 4th SEASON.
  • Apple’s reality distortion field is losing against the terrorism distortion field
    The funny thing about the FBI and tech writers accusing Apple of refusing to hack the iPhone as a “marketing strategy” is that siding with terrorists is a bad strategy.
    This story won’t go away any time soon and the ramifications are huge.
  • The baffling reason many millennials don’t eat cereal
    Few things are as painless to prepare as cereal. Making it requires little more than pouring something (a cereal of your choice) into a bowl and then pouring something else (a milk of your choice) into the same bowl. Eating it requires little more than a spoon and your mouth.
    Short version: “Millenials are lazy twats”.
  • The mind-boggling tale of how a mom found the baby stolen from her 18 years earlier
    Celeste Nurse simply thought the woman was trying to help. Nurse lay in a Cape Town, South Africa, hospital bed, groggy from the morphine masking the pain from her cesarean section three days earlier. In a cot next to her lay her newborn, a bushy haired girl.
    Once again, the human spirit is an amazing thing. Heart wrenching and heart warming story.
  • Champions of Zen
    Picture this: a hundred people sitting around a boxing ring at a Brooklyn gym one snowy evening in late January. Instead of gathering to watch people fight, they are there to watch people bend, twist, and fold their bodies into contorted yoga poses.
    What the… I mean, I understand that… nope, bonkers.
  • Egg Ninjas
    These Egg Ninjas made me laugh. So unnecessary but funny.
    WANT.
  • Like This So I Know I’m Real
    This week, Facebook augmented its signature “like” function with a more complex range of responses. We now have the option to laugh, love, or be saddened, angered, or astounded.
    But… WHY?
  • The Apple-FBI Fight Isn’t About Privacy vs. Security. Don’t Be Misled
    Throughout the ongoing fight between Apple and the FBI over custom access to an iPhone used by one of the two terrorists who killed 14 people in San Bernardino, the government has framed the argument as a simple trade-off: You must surrender a little privacy if you want more security.
    I know, another story about this. But, seriously, it’s a big deal.
  • Behind the Scam: What Does It Take to Be a ‘Best-Selling Author’? $3 and 5 Minutes.
    I would like to tell you about the biggest lie in book publishing. It appears in the biographies and social media profiles of almost every working “author” today. It’s the word “best seller.” This isn’t about how The New York Times list is biased (though it is).
    I’m SO GLAD I spent November writing ALL THE WORDS… rolls eyes