Our weekly recap highlighting the best feature stories from around the internet.
Making A Murderer's Steven Avery. Photo: Facebook
How “Making a Murderer” goes wrong - by Kathryn Schulz, The New Yorker
“For those people, and for others close to the original case, “Making a Murderer” seems less like investigative journalism than like highbrow vigilante justice. “My initial reaction was that I shouldn’t be upset with the documentarians, because they can’t help that the public reacted the way that it did,” Penny Beerntsen said. “But the more I thought about it, the more I thought, Well, yeah, they do bear responsibility, because of the way they put together the footage. To me, the fact that the response was almost universally ‘Oh, my God, these two men are innocent’ speaks to the bias of the piece. A jury doesn’t deliberate twenty-some hours over three or four days if the evidence wasn’t more complex.””
Has New Zealand Spawned a Rapper From a Deeper Circle of Hell Than Iggy Azalea? - Noisey
“Weave Snatch is a truly remarkable video but not because Hucci Luv, the MC behind it, is from New Zealand. Weave Snatch is actually just remarkable because it made it online during a time when the internet was basically one giant roundtable about why shit exactly like this shouldn’t exist. It’s remarkable because the entire World Wide Web was saying ‘No’ and Hucci Luv didn’t hear them.”
The Confessions of R. Kelly – by Chris Heath, GQ
“There's a common way that journalists often choose to approach encounters like this. Ask all the easy stuff first. Get on the subject's good side, get their confidence. Leave the tricky stuff until late in the last interview, when everything else is safely asked and answered, and then grab what you can. That's not how I'm doing this. First, if he isn't prepared to engage in some kind of serious discussion on the more difficult parts of his life, then I can't see how there can be a significant article about R. Kelly in 2016 that is worth printing.”
A Hateful Wait – the unbearable terror of interviewing Quentin Tarantino – by Alex Casey, The Spinoff
“I had questions, sure. I had whittled them down slowly over the past few days, trying to find an angle that didn’t include the n-word, violence or anything that would prompt Tarantino to want to “shut my butt down”. As I re-read my questions, printed hastily at a City Convenience where I accidentally also picked up half of somebody’s CV, I started to doubt everything I had ever known. What if he doesn’t want to talk about his female characters at all? What if he is feeling stroppy? Will he be able to smell it on me that I fell asleep during my first viewing of Jackie Brown?”
A conversation with Jessica Hansell - Starling
“Rap might be the most accountable form of poetry there is, it’s the most accessible whether people like it or not. The work of Saul Williams is how I realised I was a hybrid actually, that it was possible and I could do both on my own terms. I did the painful only Polynesian in the postgraduate writing class routine, which gave me a thick skin and Babylonian awareness if nothing else. It made me overanalyse my voice and get too goth and serious about what poetry even is. Does anyone even know?”
Why Some People Take Breakups Harder Than Others – by Lauren Howe, The Atlantic
“One strategy for making breakups a little easier, then, might be to consciously consider the narratives we create about the experience. A person might think: I was bad at communicating in the relationship; I guess I just can't open up to people. Another story might be: I was bad at communicating in the relationship, but that’s something that I can work on, and future relationships will be better. Maybe a healthy habit of questioning our own narratives can help us to make better ones—stories that promote resilience in the face of pain.”