Our weekly recap highlighting the best feature stories from around the internet.
New York Times reporter Emily Steel talks to Marie Claire this week about uncovering the sexual harassment allegations that led to Bill O'Reilly's departure from Fox. Photo: AFP
Meet the Woman Who Took Bill O'Reilly Down, by Kaitlin Menza, Marie Claire
“In her more defeated moments, Steel found inspiration—in an instance of life imitating art imitating life—in the movie Spotlight. "I would listen to what Rachel McAdams would say. She would say things like, 'The words are really important.' And when we're telling these stories, the details are really specific," she says. She tried mimicking McAdams' character, Sacha Pfeiffer of the Boston Globe. "I'd say to sources, 'I know it's hard and I know it's scary, but we need to know. We need to know.'"
The NBA Is Lucky I’m Home Doing Damn Articles, by Dion Waiters, The Players’ Tribune
“I told Pat about some of the shit I’ve seen, and some of the people I’ve lost. By the time I was 12 years old, both my mom and dad got shot. I’ve had brothers, cousins, uncles and friends get murdered. Too many to count, for real. You know what the crazy thing about death and violence is? You get numb to it. You really do. So because of everything I’d seen and lost, I decided from a young age: You know what? I’m just gonna f***ing ball out.”
What Bullets do to Bodies, by Jason Fagone, The Huffington Post
‘“As a country,” Goldberg said, “we lost our teachable moment.” She started talking about the 2012 murder of 20 schoolchildren and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Goldberg said that if people had been shown the autopsy photos of the kids, the gun debate would have been transformed. “The fact that not a single one of those kids was able to be transported to a hospital, tells me that they were not just dead, but really really really really dead. Ten-year-old kids, riddled with bullets, dead as doornails.”’
The Empathy Of "S-Town" Doesn’t Extend To Black People, by Wesley Jenkins, Buzzfeed
“But sometimes, in trying to more fully reveal America and all the parts of it we don’t see or acknowledge, we occlude it further. So the white Southerners whom I, and so many black Americans, would face only with terror are met by our own white friends with open arms. It is not that those people, however racist, are not worthy of compassion. But when will that compassion be tempered with judgement that takes into account black suffering as if it is a real thing that happened and is still happening all over the nation? I fear that, when it comes to white Americans, North looks South and South looks North so they can both avoid looking at the rest of us.”
How Netflix’s Hot Girls Wanted Demeans the Women it Wants to Empower, by Josephine Livingstone, New Republic
“In their rush to “humanize” adult performers and explore the concept of “empowerment,” the producers enact precisely the kind of objectification and dehumanization that they aim to critique. Legal though it may be to show the face of somebody who signed a release and then said no, and legal though it may be to introduce an adult Periscope scene to a mainstream audience, the documentary displays a lack of interest in its subjects’ consent that should alarm viewers interested in journalistic ethics, women’s safety, or both.”
Margaret Atwood Is Still Seeing the Future, by Alison Herman, The Ringer
“No work of art can choose its context. And in the nearly six months since the 2016 election, no series, movie, book, or podcast’s context has been altered more radically than The Handmaid’s Tale. Watching the show’s principals navigate that sudden shift has made for a fascinating press tour. More importantly, situating the show within our new reality makes for profoundly affecting TV. The Handmaid’s Tale didn’t ask for this moment. The show rises to it regardless.”
#Vanlife, the Bohemian Social-Media Movement, by Rachel Monroe, The New Yorker
“King and Smith have posted more than thirteen hundred photographs to their account. Scrolling through the feed in chronological order, you can see King, who shoots most of the photos, become better at composing and editing images, and at tailoring them to what the audience wants to see. In the early days, she took pictures of flowers and sunsets. “I’d never post something like that now,” she said, looking at a closeup of ripening blackberries, from four years ago. As I thumbed toward the top of the screen, I had the disconcerting sense of watching a life become a life-style brand.”
'Austin Powers' at 20: Mike Myers, Jay Roach, More Spill Secrets in Shagadelic Oral History, by Ryan Parker, The Hollywood Reporter
“It was difficult shooting at the giant underground facility where the missile is. We shot that in a power plant which we had been promised would be dormant because it was a back-up plant for Los Angeles. Then, on that weekend, there had been a brownout, and they had to kick that plant into action. The decibel level was so high, we were required to wear sound-blocking headphones. I directed everybody by screaming at them and using gestures. We would quickly take the headphones off the actors. It was such an unbelievable nightmare.”