Gatsby's Great Love
We like to think we deserve love, that as a celebrated facet of the human experience everyone is allowed at least a taste. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby offered characters too hollowed by wealth to access anything beyond desire and ambition. Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation gives us something to mourn. A classically unrequited love impeded by class and time complete with a sighing Carey Mulligan saying “I wish I could do everything on Earth with you.”
It’s this vision of Daisy and Gatsby that saves the story from being flattened by Luhrmann’s penchant for spectacle. Between Rolls Royces barreling down bridges, fireworks exploding over mansions, and beaded hemlines swishing in time to the din, a treatise on love exists quietly. For a love story to inspire it must simply confirm our deepest suspicions about what we imagine love to be. And Luhrmann indulges both cynics and romantics…
by Ayesha A. Siddiqi
Great White Hoax: Chael Sonnen, Racial Coding, and the UFC
I spoke with MMA expert Tomas Rios on how fighter Chael Sonnen exploits white resentment in the UFC.
![Miss Universe Pageant 1954- Miss New Zealand passed out from the heat [via]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lskzi7Kui81qa70eyo1_500.jpg)
Democracy Now’s interview with Jeremy Scahill, author of the new book, “Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield.” Scahill charts the expanding covert wars operated by the CIA and JSOC, the Joint Special Operations Command, in countries from Somalia to Pakistan. Read an excerpt of the book here
Farea Al-Muslimi, a Yemeni journalist speaking to the Senate Judiciary Committee in a hearing on the legality of the drone war
Rosa Brooks, Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center, told the Senate that the Obama administration’s drone war undermines the rule of law.
“When a government claims for itself the unreviewable power to kill anyone, anywhere on earth, at any time, based on secret criteria and secret information discussed in a secret process by largely unnamed individuals, it undermines the rule of law,” Brooks said.
Bikini, Kill by Ayesha A. Siddiqi
Because a movie that suspends patriarchal privilege is more enjoyable than ones that take it for granted.
Don’t hate the slayer, hate the game
The New Inquiry: Presenting The New Inquiry’s first free supplement, a pdf collection of eight critical essays on Harmony Korine’s Disneyland dystopia Spring Breakers. Spring Break Forever.
Catch me in the new inquiry talking about gun fellatio
s/o to Sarah Nicole Prickett and Malcolm Harris for making this issue possible
