Our weekly recap highlighting the best feature stories from around the internet.
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‘Transparent’ Creator Jill Soloway on Caitlyn Jenner, Lena Dunham, and Mark Ruffalo’s Trans Casting Controversy – by Kevin Fallon, The Daily Beast
“Until trans people have more narrative representation, until women have more representation, until people of colour have more representation, we absolutely have to be asking people of privilege—especially white cis men—to curtail their desire to project their notions of Otherness onto the characters they create and, instead, provide opportunities to trans, queer, female, Black artists and simply step away from the steering wheel.”
David Simon Wants It to Be One Way, but It’s the Other Way – by Micah Peters, The Ringer
“I guess this is the kind of L you take when you have people gassing you up about how you canonised the prestige drama or deifying you for being vocally against things like mass incarceration and the war on drugs. You might start to believe you have some sort of laminated cultural pass that lets you go wherever and say whatever you please.”
New Zealand's racist justice system - Our law is not colour-blind – by Eugene Bingham and Paula Penfold, Stuff Circuit
“As part of our research, we looked back at the number of police apprehensions over the past 10 years. It's roughly the same number for Pakeha as Maori - 875,000 versus 868,000. But if the number of Maori apprehensions were adjusted to match the proportion of the population made up by Maori, the number of Maori apprehensions would reduce to about 300,000. Think about that for a minute: half a million fewer arrests of Maori. Imagine what it would mean not just for Maori but for our country if that was the reality.”
The Critic Who Convinced Me That Criticism Could Be Art - by Hua Hsu, The New Yorker
“For a generation of critics, Greg Tate’s career has served as a reminder that diversity isn’t just about a splash of colour in the group photo; it’s about the different ways that people see, feel, and move within the world. These differences can be imperceptible, depending on where your eye lingers as you scan the newsroom. What made Tate’s criticism special was his ability to theorise outward from his encounters with genius and his brushes with banality—to telescope between moments of artistic inspiration and the giant structures within which those moments were produced.”
Hollywood, Separate and Unequal – by Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott, The New York Times
“The movies with black protagonists that tend to win awards — to be legitimized, in other words, as mainstream, serious and prestigious — are more often than not about exceptional figures, many of them drawn from the annals of American history. Athletes. Musicians. Leaders. People whose remarkable accomplishments both ease the consciences of white viewers and mask the collective struggles and communal experiences that sustained the heroes in their work.”
Jay Z: ‘The War on Drugs Is an Epic Fail’ – The New York Times
