Our weekly recap highlighting the best feature stories from around the internet.
Photo: AFP
Photo: AFP
Why Do Young Stars Like Selena Gomez Work With Woody Allen?, by Ira Madison III, The Daily Beast
“It’s your right and your privilege, because you are a protected Hollywood actor and not a child living in Allen’s house. You’re not on the crew of a Casey Affleck film. You’re not alone with Roman Polanski. And thank God you’re not a black woman in Chicago, because no one would really give a fuck about you and they’d let R. Kelly prey on you, your community, and the young girls in your city for years without doing a damn thing while letting him perform at awards shows.”
What a Fraternity Hazing Death Revealed About the Painful Search for an Asian-American Identity, by Jay Caspian Kang, The New York Times
“Asians are the loneliest Americans. The collective political consciousness of the ’80s has been replaced by the quiet, unaddressed isolation that comes with knowing that you can be born in this country, excel in its schools and find a comfortable place in its economy and still feel no stake in the national conversation. The current vision of solidarity among Asian-Americans is cartoonish and blurry and relegated to conversations at family picnics, in drunken exchanges over food that reminds everyone at the table of how their mom used to make it.”
How America Lost Its Mind, by Kurt Andersen, The Atlantic
“The country has always been a one-of-a-kind place. But our singularity is different now. We’re still rich and free, still more influential and powerful than any other nation, practically a synonym for developed country. But our drift toward credulity, toward doing our own thing, toward denying facts and having an altogether uncertain grip on reality, has overwhelmed our other exceptional national traits and turned us into a less developed country.”
Meet The Professor Who Says Sex In A Blackout Isn't Always Rape, by Katie J.M. Baker
“On the stand, Fromme will define the difference between “passing out,” or losing consciousness, and “blacking out,” in which your brain only loses the ability to transfer information from short-term to long-term memory. She will explain that there are two different types of blackouts — “fragmentary,” in which you can recall certain events if prompted, and permanent “en bloc” blackouts — and that even if someone shows clear signs of intoxication, such as slurred speech, it doesn’t mean they’re unable to engage in voluntary actions. She will say it’s as impossible to tell if someone is experiencing a blackout as it is to tell if someone has a headache, because it’s happening inside that person’s brain, invisible to others.”
The Story of the DuckTales Theme, History’s Catchiest Single Minute of Music, by Darryn King, Vanity Fair
“Search for “DuckTales theme” on Twitter, and you’ll find Twitter users everywhere singing the same tune, literally—declaring that the tune has gotten hopelessly stuck in their heads. In the DuckTales promotional “money pit” photo op at Disney’s D23 Expo in July, the rebooted theme played on a constant loop, with many guests in the vicinity audibly humming and singing along. “It’s in my head as I’m answering these questions,” Stafford told me, while preparing to board a flight at Paris’s Charles de Gaulle Airport. “It will now be stuck in my head the entire flight back to L.A.”’
An Oral History of the Time a Dog Ate a Heart on ‘One Tree Hill’, by Andrew Gruttadaro, The Ringer
“Now, my mother will tell you that Dan was her favorite character and she felt sorry for him. I just felt like, we don’t want Dan’s redemption to be too easy. We don’t want him to get a heart transplant and have it be too conventional. We want to take him to the edge of hope and then see what he’s made of. I just thought, “What’s an absurd way of this guy getting really close to getting this heart transplant and not getting it?”’