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Now, the links you’re here for:
Blasian love: The day we introduced our black and Asian families (Megha Mohan, BBC)
“It was almost like, if you were dating someone who’s white, it’s expected,” Tumelo says. “I feel like people can justify you dating someone white, it’s almost like you’re dating ‘up’. I think it is a post-apartheid thing, people have a hierarchy that was built up in their head.”
Was the Millennium Dome really so bad? The inside story of a (not so) total disaster (Imogen West-Knights, The Guardian)
But for the thousands of people involved in putting on the Millennium Experience, from government ministers to service staff, the worst was yet to come. For the duration of the year that the Dome was open, it was perceived as a catastrophe. Richard Rogers, one of the architects behind the building, said in 2015 that it “couldn’t have had a worse reception if you’d worked hard to deliberately upset everybody”. Twenty years later, it is still a byword for New Labour hubris, squandered resources and hideously bungled planning.
In fact, it was a byword for all of these things before it even opened. The urge to think of the Dome as something pitiable was apparent long before anybody actually saw what was inside. In the final paragraph of Elizabeth Wilhide’s official book on the Millennium Dome, published in 1999, she writes that “its legacy, the Dome’s true meaning, will only be known long after the moment has passed, when the children who are its visitors today grow up and look back”. Now, doing just that, it is clear that the prevailing narrative that the Dome was a total failure is not – or at least not quite – the full story.
How to write well (Irina Dumitrescu, Times Literary Supplement)
Writing advice is caught in this paradox. Mavens of clear communication know that simple rules are memorable and easy to follow. Use a verb instead of a noun. Change passive to active. Cut unnecessary words. Avoid jargon. No aspiring author will make the language dance by following these dictates, but they will be understood, and that is something. The same holds for structure. In school, pupils are drilled in the basic shapes of arguments, such as the “rule of three”, the “five-paragraph essay” or, à l’américaine, the Hamburger Essay (the main argument being the meat). Would-be novelists weigh their Fichtean Curves against their Hero’s Journeys, and screenwriters can buy software that will ensure their movie script hits every beat prescribed by Blake Snyder in his bestselling book Save the Cat! (2005). And why not? Shakespeare patterned his comedies on Terence’s Latin romps, and Terence stole his plots from the Greek Menander. Milton copied Virgil, who plagiarized Homer. The history of literature is a catwalk on which the same old skeletons keep coming out in new clothes.
The Storykiller and His Sentence: Rebecca Solnit on Harvey Weinstein (Rebecca Solnit, Lit Hub)
There were grips and gaffers and best boys, sound engineers and editors and acting coaches to make the stories; there were spies, lawyers, insurance companies, underlings to unmake the other stories, some of them skilled actors themselves, and they went even after the newspapers and journalists who got wind of those stories. The whole society was complicit in allowing a system of silencing to exist, even a formal legal contract called a nondisclosure agreement, which meant that her (and sometimes his or their but so often her) story would be silent forever. One of his victims was not allowed to talk even to her family or therapists about what happened and when she finally broke her long silence she spoke of what torment it was and joined a congresswoman in sponsoring legislation; many of them at last violated their NDAs to speak, and the complicity of celebrity lawyers and the legal strategy for strangling stories, the silence for sale, looked bad when it was dragged out in the light of day, and some states passed laws limiting them, at least as they pertained to sex.
The Killing of a Colorado Rancher (Rachel Monroe, The Atlantic)
Despite Jake’s friends’ attempts to keep the investigation energized, months passed without much development. A year went by, and then another. Ajarian was alarmed to realize that he’d gotten used to Jake being gone. He and his friends sometimes joked about a gray-haired Jake popping up in 50 years, cackling about the epic prank he’d played on them, but the unspoken truth was that they all assumed he was dead. Not knowing why or how, or where his body was, was maddening. There had been no funeral where they could make speeches about how much he’d mattered to them and cry together for his loss. His family continued to live as if he’d never existed. With no official action, it was hard not to feel as though Jake’s disappearance—and his life—didn’t matter. The friend group slowly began to disperse: Lopez moved to Texas; Katheiser was in Colorado Springs. Sometimes Ajarian thought of Jake almost as a ghost—there and not there at the same time.
Image credit: Vania Wolf