Our weekly recap highlighting the best feature stories from around the internet.
Phife Dawg (middle) with Q-Tip and Jarobi White of A Tribe Called Quest. Photo: AFP
The Heroic Uncool of Phife Dawg – by Zach Baron, GQ
“Kanye West, sharing every low feeling and dubious emotion? He learned that from Phife. In A Tribe Called Quest, Phife had a foil in his childhood best friend, Q-Tip, who was everything he wasn't: tall, smooth, handsome, effortless. Their interplay—the swagger and vulnerability, the ease and the sweat—made Tribe Tribe. Tip taught a generation of us to be a little cooler; Phife taught us to love the fact that we weren't, particularly.”
Zayn: On My Own – by Joe La Puma, Complex
“There may be a time where I feel like I have something to say about a certain topic and I’m educated enough and armed with the exact information I need before I make a statement that doesn’t offend anybody. Then I will do that. But in today’s day and age, it’s very hard to make any sort of statement that doesn’t offend somebody. I don’t want to throw stones out of a river that’s already raging. You know what I’m saying?”
Riding the Wave of Feminism: Meet the Female Surfers of Iran – by Natasha Wynarczyk, Broadly
“Extreme sports are growing in popularity among young Iranians, especially millennial women. “This mainly started in Tehran, and it was mainly men competing,” Mazhari tells me. “But now women are joining in—and realizing they are just as good as guys. It's really empowering for us.””
Drake’s Very Own: On Dennis Graham’s Instagram – by Doreen St. Felix, The New York Times Magazine
“If parents are the original critics, then they are also the first stans, unrestricted by the distancing effect of fame’s machine. That love is never perfect, but it can, perhaps, always be salvaged. Parents are hams for their kids: the doting messages, the outsize concerns, the self-sacrifice. Anyone, famous or not quite, who has been the living, breathing investment of one or two more individuals recognizes, and probably cringes at, their parents’ deeply camp habits.”
Pride and prejudice: Who deserves a place in the Pride Parade? – by Janet McAllister, Metro
“In 2004, Judith Collins described the Civil Union Bill as being “about gay marriage” and voted against it. How times have changed: nine years later, she voted in favour of same-sex marriage and in February, as Minister for Police and Corrections, she walked in the Pride Parade, along with uniformed police and Corrections officers.”
I Got a New Phone and Became Someone Else (a Hairstylist in Cleveland) - by Alyssa Bereznak, Following
“Everyone has a person they’re waiting on a text from: an errant boyfriend, an impatient boss, an overdue Seamless order. I just spent a stretch of my life waiting on texts from several people — not friends or co-workers or food-delivery guys. No, lately I’ve been waiting on texts from a bunch of Jewish guys near Cleveland asking me to cut their hair.”
Morgan Godfery on the new popularism, the politics of love and his new book, The Interregnum: Rethinking New Zealand – by Henry Oliver, Idealog
“My pet theory is that people have checked out because they're disillusioned. They don't think that change can happen. They think that change goes in the opposite direction to their needs – weakening of worker's rights, weakening of the social safety net. But we haven't seen anything to replace that. If you're going to weaken workers rights, you should also increase opportunities for education, but at the same time as we weakened workers rights we actually introduced a fee paying tertiary education system. And it hasn't worked out for many.”