Our weekly recap highlighting the best feature stories from around the internet.
Unknown Mortal Orchestra's Ruban Nielson. Photo: Dusdin Condren
Love Is Strange: The Multitudes of Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s Ruban Nielson – by David Bevan, Pitchfork
“After touring behind his first two albums for nearly three years, Nielson arranged to take a year off, so that he could write, record, and spend more time at home with his family. But as work on Multi-Love began in earnest last year, Nielson and his wife found themselves reconsidering the outlines of their relationship. As we eat and laugh at their tiny wooden dinner table, I’m sitting in a seat that, up until very recently, was occupied by someone else, someone whose absence is palpable and whose influence can be felt throughout the record she helped shape. “It’s not that this song is about her,” Nielson sings in the album’s hypnotic title cut. “Most songs are about her.””
The Last Days of O Week – by Don Rowe, 1972/Metro
“They’re a special breed of freak in Dunedin, though, and it takes some serious endurance to even stay in sight of them, let alone keep up. Perhaps their digestive systems have devolved to some bovine state, capable of surviving on the sustenance of mi goreng ramen noodles and cheap bourbon RTDs, but mine hasn’t. I spent a long night with my head in a garden listening to the sirens across the city and trying to stop the world from spinning. I began to fade.”
The Price of Nice Nails - by Sarah Maslin Nir, New York Times
“Tucked in her pocket was $100 in carefully folded bills for another expense: the fee the salon owner charges each new employee for her job. The deal was the same as it is for beginning manicurists in almost any salon in the New York area. She would work for no wages, subsisting on meager tips, until her boss decided she was skillful enough to merit a wage. It would take nearly three months before her boss paid her. Thirty dollars a day.”
Jessica Hopper: Stop Telling Girls the Way They Listen to Music Is Wrong - by Eliza Berman, Time
“Hopper wants to offer permission to young girls—permission she recalls receiving in observing the careers of critics like Terri Sutton—to play and participate in music in whatever way they choose. As the title of her book conveys, she believes women’s experience in music, both as consumers and creators, is marginalized; for her, it’s about moving the dial.”
New Zealand is a gay-bashing country - by Mark Reason, Stuff
“The prime minister uses the word gay as a term of disparagement on a radio show and Israel Dagg calls another player a 'fag'. So what, many of you will say, understandably bored of continually being told what to think by the PC brigade. Well, careless talk costs lives. Homophobia creates lonely outcasts many of whom commit suicide.”
Split Image – by Kate Fagan, ESPN
“Everyone presents an edited version of life on social media. People share moments that reflect an ideal life, an ideal self. Hundreds of years ago, we sent letters by horseback, containing only what we wanted the recipient to read. Fifty years ago, we spoke via the telephone, sharing only the details that constructed the self we wanted reflected. With Instagram, one thing has changed: the amount we consume of one another's edited lives. Young women growing up on Instagram are spending a significant chunk of each day absorbing others' filtered images while they walk through their own realities, unfiltered.”
Looking at Female Superheroes with Ten-Year-Old Boys – by Jill Lepore, The New Yorker
“Left to my own devices, I’d have said that the message [with “Avengers: Age of Ultron”] is that, yes, men are being rendered redundant by robots but, phew, women still have nice breasts. (Another new movie, “Ex Machina,” in which the robot who makes men redundant has nice breasts, is a twofer.) But that seemed cynical, so I decided to consult the experts: I went to see the movie with a bunch of ten-year-old boys, and then read the comic book with two of them.”
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