Link Salad, the Subterranean Stories Edition
-- City of Water - David Grann, The New Yorker, Sept. 1, 2003
"No one knows how many sandhogs are, at any given moment, working beneath the streets of New York City, but one morning this winter half a dozen men could be spotted gathering around a hole on the northwest corner of Tenth Avenue and Thirtieth Street. The hole, surrounded by a tall aluminum fence, was thirty feet wide and reinforced with concrete. A priest had visited months before, to offer a brief prayer: “May God be with all ye who enter here, that the earth shall return ye safely.” Now, as the sun rose, the men stepped from the snow-covered ground into a green metal cage, which was suspended over the chasm by an enormous winch. They wore yellow slickers and rubber boots with steel tips; they carried, among other things, flashlights, scissors, cigarettes, cough drops, knives, extra socks, and several twenty-pound crates marked “EXPLOSIVES.”"
-- Who do you think you are? -- Trans Narratives - Jacqueline Rose, London Review of Books, May 5, 2016
"That Telesford was a woman of colour is also crucial. If the number of trans people who are murdered is disproportionate, trans people of colour constitute by far the largest subset - the seven trans women murdered in the US in the first seven weeks of 2015 were all women of colour. Today, those fighting for trans freedom are increasingly keen to address this racial factor (like the feminists before them who also ignored it at first) - in the name of social justice and equality, but also because placing trans in the wider picture can help challenge the assumption that transsexuality is an isolated phenomenon, beyond human endurance in and of itself. It is a paradox of the transsexual bid for emancipation that the more visible trans people become, the more they seem to excite, as well as greater acceptance, a peculiarly murderous hatred. ‘I know people have to learn about other people’s lives in order to become more tolerant,’ Jayne County writes in Man Enough to Be a Woman (one of Jacques’s main inspirations), but ‘sometimes that makes bigotry worse. The more straight people know about us, the more they have to hate.’"
-- R.I.P., GOP: How Trump Is Killing the Republican Party - Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone, May 18, 2016
"If this isn't the end for the Republican Party, it'll be a shame. They dominated American political life for 50 years and were never anything but monsters. They bred in their voters the incredible attitude that Republicans were the only people within our borders who raised children, loved their country, died in battle or paid taxes. They even sullied the word "American" by insisting they were the only real ones. They preferred Lubbock to Paris, and their idea of an intellectual was Newt Gingrich. Their leaders, from Ralph Reed to Bill Frist to Tom DeLay to Rick Santorum to Romney and Ryan, were an interminable assembly line of shrieking, witch-hunting celibates, all with the same haircut - the kind of people who thought Iran-Contra was nothing, but would grind the affairs of state to a halt over a blow job or Terri Schiavo's feeding tube."
-- The Pitch Meeting for Animaniacs - Abbey Fenbert, The Toast, May 24, 2016
"EXEC #2: You’re saying that ten years from now, a young person will watch The Godfather or read Freud for the first time and realize that the Viennese shrink archetype in their minds was actually from Animaniacs all along? And the mumbling mafia don and the plot of Les Miserables and the fall of the Tsars? That the show will act as a sort of contextual membrane through which kids absorb quintessential images that will one day render direct source material more accessible, and that the cultural déjà vu they experience when they encounter said material will recur throughout their adult lives?"
"No one knows how many sandhogs are, at any given moment, working beneath the streets of New York City, but one morning this winter half a dozen men could be spotted gathering around a hole on the northwest corner of Tenth Avenue and Thirtieth Street. The hole, surrounded by a tall aluminum fence, was thirty feet wide and reinforced with concrete. A priest had visited months before, to offer a brief prayer: “May God be with all ye who enter here, that the earth shall return ye safely.” Now, as the sun rose, the men stepped from the snow-covered ground into a green metal cage, which was suspended over the chasm by an enormous winch. They wore yellow slickers and rubber boots with steel tips; they carried, among other things, flashlights, scissors, cigarettes, cough drops, knives, extra socks, and several twenty-pound crates marked “EXPLOSIVES.”"
-- Who do you think you are? -- Trans Narratives - Jacqueline Rose, London Review of Books, May 5, 2016
"That Telesford was a woman of colour is also crucial. If the number of trans people who are murdered is disproportionate, trans people of colour constitute by far the largest subset - the seven trans women murdered in the US in the first seven weeks of 2015 were all women of colour. Today, those fighting for trans freedom are increasingly keen to address this racial factor (like the feminists before them who also ignored it at first) - in the name of social justice and equality, but also because placing trans in the wider picture can help challenge the assumption that transsexuality is an isolated phenomenon, beyond human endurance in and of itself. It is a paradox of the transsexual bid for emancipation that the more visible trans people become, the more they seem to excite, as well as greater acceptance, a peculiarly murderous hatred. ‘I know people have to learn about other people’s lives in order to become more tolerant,’ Jayne County writes in Man Enough to Be a Woman (one of Jacques’s main inspirations), but ‘sometimes that makes bigotry worse. The more straight people know about us, the more they have to hate.’"
-- R.I.P., GOP: How Trump Is Killing the Republican Party - Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone, May 18, 2016
"If this isn't the end for the Republican Party, it'll be a shame. They dominated American political life for 50 years and were never anything but monsters. They bred in their voters the incredible attitude that Republicans were the only people within our borders who raised children, loved their country, died in battle or paid taxes. They even sullied the word "American" by insisting they were the only real ones. They preferred Lubbock to Paris, and their idea of an intellectual was Newt Gingrich. Their leaders, from Ralph Reed to Bill Frist to Tom DeLay to Rick Santorum to Romney and Ryan, were an interminable assembly line of shrieking, witch-hunting celibates, all with the same haircut - the kind of people who thought Iran-Contra was nothing, but would grind the affairs of state to a halt over a blow job or Terri Schiavo's feeding tube."
-- The Pitch Meeting for Animaniacs - Abbey Fenbert, The Toast, May 24, 2016
"EXEC #2: You’re saying that ten years from now, a young person will watch The Godfather or read Freud for the first time and realize that the Viennese shrink archetype in their minds was actually from Animaniacs all along? And the mumbling mafia don and the plot of Les Miserables and the fall of the Tsars? That the show will act as a sort of contextual membrane through which kids absorb quintessential images that will one day render direct source material more accessible, and that the cultural déjà vu they experience when they encounter said material will recur throughout their adult lives?"