I Speak to God in Public: Chance the Rapper’s Faith
David Dark | MTV News
“On Chance the Rapper’s third mixtape, Coloring Book, the heart of the 23-year-old Chicago MC is very much on his sleeve. But we’ve seen Chancelor Bennett’s heart before. Love requires a context, like lust needs a setting. For Chance the Rapper, the context (classroom, church, family, neighborhood, fans) is never far away. There’s no life to be lived without one. On Coloring Book, heaven—like hell—is always other people.”
On Playing Games, Productivity, and Right Livelihood
Janet Frishberg | The Rumpus
“I wanted to know what it meant to spend a life this way. How much damage can you do to anyone else if you stay quiet and alone all day, if all you’re doing is rearranging the same sets of pixels on a screen with your fingers on a touchpad or a keyboard for points or to complete levels? If you have nothing to show for your day, I wanted to believe, nothing can hurt anyone.”
Bookslut Was Born in an Era of Internet Freedom. Today’s Web Has Killed It
Jess Crispin | The Guardian
“Back then, nothing you did mattered. And that gave you freedom. Back then, the online book culture was run mostly by enthusiasts and amateurs, people who were creating blogs and webzines simply for the pleasure of it, rather than to build a career or a brand. I know that nostalgia is a stupid emotion, but still I regret the day money found the Internet. Once advertisers showed up, offering to pay us to do the thing we were doing just for fun, it was very hard to say no. Or understand exactly what the trade-offs would be.”
Conservatives Anonymous
Andy Kroll | California Sunday
“Hollywood is a famously brutal place to work. So many talented people are competing for so few spots; rejection—and the insecurity that comes with it—is the norm. It’s not just actresses who see their careers evaporate at 35, replaced by the latest crop of ingénues living at the Oakwood Apartments ... Conservatives in the industry face an additional question with no clear answer: Have their political views stifled their careers?”
Banshee, Game of Thrones, and the Problems With Serial-Killer Plots
Maureen Ryan | Variety
“In a show that is all about people’s movement through different moral agendas—from pragmatism to amorality to self-interest to clan loyalty—Ramsay has been a fixed point, but not in a good way. A character going from incredibly monstrous to even more monstrous is not a journey; he’s just become a bigger and blunter version of the thing he always was.”
Our Brand Could Be Your Crisis
Ayesha Siddiqi | The New Inquiry
“But a major-studio movie with model-pretty actors that has zero cachet when name-dropped in conversation is the perfect conclusion to anachronistic first-wave millennial angst and pre-Condé Nast Pitchfork-era debates. Maybe that’s why it inspired so much knee-jerk dismissal, reigniting the old impulse to make fun of the Troy Boltons of the world and their lack of cool irony.”
Violence Is Golden: Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and Shane Black’s Simple Art of Murder
Priscilla Page | Birth Movies Death
“The detective is driven to solve the mystery by an obscure object of desire, something powerful and unknowable, and in the process he is driven to his destruction or his redemption. In Black’s movies, his protagonists are at their most damaged, and the secret, unknowable thing they’re driven toward is innocence, magic, redemption.”
