Our weekly recap highlighting the best feature stories from around the internet.
Melania Trump selfie, 2015. Photo: Melania Trump/Instagram
Fairytale Prisoner by Choice: The Photographic Eye of Melania Trump, Kate Imbach, Medium
She’s hiding. She needs to hide so badly that she doesn’t care about anything else. Not her country, not how bad she looks, not the money it costs us. She has no shame because, for her, hiding is shameless. It is safe.
She lives behind glass, in cars, in her house, on private planes and private resorts. She doesn’t even get out of the car to see landmarks or walk in the park. She is never among the public, not for a second.
The March for Science, explained, by Brian Resnick, Vox
In Boston in February, the Union of Concerned Scientists co-sponsored a Stand Up for Science rally in Copley Square, and it felt like a prelude to the Science March. The people there brought signs that said things like “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the precipitate” and “Trump’s team are like atoms: they make up everything!”
The Spinoff meets movie composer Hans Zimmer *ominous organ tone*, Madeleine Chapman, The Spinoff
The Jack Nicholson character in As Good As It Gets, I could not crack that character for the longest time. I finally said to Jim after about three weeks or so of just sitting there with blank pages, I said ‘What are you doing this weekend? Why don’t you come in and sit down on the couch.’ It became a great way of working together. He would sit there, I’d plonk around, sometimes I would see there was a spark of something, and we sort of discovered it together. Sometimes I’d look around and he’d be asleep on the couch, as well. Or sometimes he’d be starting to talk about something completely different and I had a tune in my head and I would shush him. That really goes for all the directors I work with. We make the music, it’s not just me. It’s a truly collaborative process. It’s all story. Just speak with story.
Kendrick Lamar's Holy Spirit, by Hua Hsu, The New Yorker
The success of “good kid” helped inspire “To Pimp a Butterfly,” released three years later. The songs on that album communicated Lamar’s ambivalence about his sudden fame, particularly at a moment when the nascent Black Lives Matter movement was casting light on all the young people, growing up just as he had, who would never see their twenties. He wanted to stay grounded, and not to sell out, and he explored this desire by making dark, adventurous music steeped in seventies funk and spaced-out jazz. It’s not that he spurned the mainstream. His albums have sold well, and he’s contributed verses to hit songs by Taylor Swift and Maroon 5. But these simple, tidy guest appearances underscore how much attention he pours into the carefully rendered characters, symbols, and places that populate his own albums.
How Donald Trump's Success Produced Bill O'Reilly's Downfall, by Alex Wagner, The Atlantic
O’Reilly, long a Trump ally (and vice versa: the president was one of the very few in recent days to publicly offer a defense of the controversial host), is unlikely to be the last casualty of the fractious divide that has emerged in the wake of a resurgent white populism.
Is it worth the trouble?, by Ralph Ammer, Medium
An absurd human knows about his mortality and yet doesn’t accept it, knows about the limitation of his reasoning, yet still holds it dear, feels the pleasure and pain of his experiences and yet tries to take in as many as possible.
(Warning: this story discusses suicide)