Our weekly recap highlighting the best feature stories from around the internet.
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Can a Woman’s Voice Ever Be Right? – by Jordan Kisner, The Cut
“For every wrong-voiced woman, the nominal problem is excess. The voice is too something — too loud, nasal, breathy, honking, squeaky, matronly, whispered. It reveals too much of some identity, it overflows its bounds. The excess in turn points to what’s lacking: softness, power, humor, intellect, sexiness, seriousness, coolness, warmth. The fact that these adjectives come in relatively inverse pairs isn’t a coincidence. We have some measure of control over the way we sound, but for women — and minorities — the margin of error can be vanishingly thin. It’s almost impossible to get it “right.””
Watching “The Purge” in Our Year of Nightmare Politics - by Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker
“This political season has been a gift to no one save Donald Trump, white supremacists, and, perhaps, the “Purge” franchise, a series of horror movies set in a near-future dystopian America where peace and prosperity are insured by an annual twelve-hour period of government-approved anarchy that renders all crime legal.”
Riz Ahmed: ‘You don’t need to tell me we live in scary times. I’m Muslim’ – by Alex Godfrey, The Guardian
“Ahmed isn’t afraid of being outspoken and doesn’t care, he says, if he pisses people off. His Facebook page is full of galvanising, politicised posts – not hashtagged token gestures, but researched, informed viewpoints and conclusions. He was at the Occupy protests in New York and London, and knows British history back to front. So many actors today, ultimately concerned with protecting their brand, have been numbed by media training, but Ahmed is not your typical thesp.”
Odell Beckham Jr. on Living in Drake’s House and His Next Big Rivalry – by Devin Gordon, GQ
“It’s hard to know what to make of Beckham in moments like these. Some people, even some Giants fans, will see a prima donna due for a comeuppance; others will see a merciless competitor who maybe thinks out loud too much. For what it’s worth, Beckham’s tone throughout our conversation is focused and intense, not petulant, and the message is clear: Either you’re helping him get where he wants to go, or you’re getting in his way.”
The Uncomfortable Silence - by Amberleigh Jack, Public Address
“The shame that exists ensures that the problem as a whole will never go away. We can sweep it under the rug. We can pretend it doesn’t exist. We can consider overdose deaths and less tragic than “real” tragedies. But that thinking is a tragedy in itself.”
By Your Place in the World, I Will Know Who You Are - by Tina Makereti, The Pantograph Punch
“Put simply, there is an expectation that Māori know where they come from, yet I write as a Māori who doesn’t have grounding in one place, one tribe, or one culture, but who is still Māori. I am Pākehā too. I am not part-Māori and part-Pākehā; I am both Māori and Pākehā.”
