The Internet Is Exploding: 10 Must-Read Articles This Week 10/30

The world-wide-web had my awareness everywhere this 7 days. Highlights: Elon Musk now owns Twitter, #FreeBrittneyGriner, remembering Brangelina, Daniel Radcliffe, Taylor Swift and fats-phobia, Rihanna is back again, Ashanti, Leslie Jordan and Mike Davis passed, and the Mississippi. 

1. The Guardian: Elon Musk completes Twitter takeover amid loathe speech fears

Elon Musk, presently the richest particular person alive, formally bought Twitter. The $44 billion offer has been in the operates due to the fact April. Considering the fact that taking above, which was verified Friday early morning, Musk has “reportedly ousted many senior figures, which include the chief executive, Parag Agrawal the main fiscal officer, Ned Segal and the head of lawful coverage, have confidence in and safety, Vijaya Gadde.” A self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist,” Musk also intends to reinstate Donald Trump’s account, and lots of end users are involved that misinformation and damaging written content will raise underneath Musk’s possession. This is of unique concern in the US as midterm elections are just over a 7 days absent. 

2. NPR: Brittney Griner’s jail sentence is upheld in a Russian court

WNBA participant Brittney Griner’s sentence was upheld in a Russian court on Tuesday. The star is serving a nine-year sentence soon after being convicted of allegedly smuggling hash oil into the country when playing overseas. The US authorities has been attempting to negotiate a prisoner swap, and “U.S. officials on the scene in Moscow had been brief to assail Tuesday’s court ruling as ’excessive and disproportionate’”—Griner “was supplied quite shut to the optimum sentence throughout her past trial” for a very little volume of oil. Even further, “Griner’s arrest and subsequent demo shadowed the conflict in Ukraine and cratering U.S.-Russian relations that her supporters say have knowledgeable the demo.”

Activists in DC staged a “smoke out” at the Russian embassy on Thursday in the nation’s funds in support of Griner, and there has been a display of help for her across social media. However, it should be observed that a lot of the assistance is coming from Black queer people. 

3. Vulture: What Was Brangelina?

Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie turned a couple in 2005, ideal close to the identical time I commenced paying out awareness to pop culture. Due to the fact of this, I’d always acknowledged the stars as a few, and it was not until Jolie declared that she was filing for divorce in 2016 that I realized the pair satisfied on the established of Mr. & Mrs. Smith in 2005. 

Brangelina debuted prior to social media, when tabloids continue to ran supreme, and their coupling “offered what all wonderful stars do: a fantasy, as out of achieve as it is alluring. In their decade-long union, they remodeled from a lasciviously adulterous, sexed-up electrical power few to a a lot more gently built, philanthropic team outlined as considerably by their capability for superior as their astounding attractiveness and expertise.” With the ongoing divorce reentering the community discourse, the “proceedings are not just a tale of assets divided — they will test their respective places in the popular imagination. Simply because Brangelina was normally just that: an enchantment that was shored up in the media, and that Pitt has been much better at maintaining in the extensive operate.”

4. GQ: The Odd and Superb Daniel Radcliffe

I uncover Daniel Radcliffe endearing. I simply cannot definitively say I have witnessed him in any roles outside the house of the Harry Potter collection, but each individual time I examine about him, he looks like a genuinely great man or woman. The way Jeremy Gordon portrays Radcliffe in this profile is no exception. When this piece promotes the approaching film Odd, in which Radcliffe portrays Strange Al Yankovich, all of Gordon’s observations are rooted in Radcliffe’s portrayal of Harry Potter from these a young age (the actor was 11 when he was forged around 20 several years back). Gordon continually returns to Radcliffe’s “excessively usual way of considering about the lifelong permanence of his context,” with Radcliffe stating that “sometimes if you’re denying the truth of what’s heading on, that can really make your existence tougher to are living.” 

5. HuffPost: I Love Taylor Swift, But There is A Large Trouble With Her New Video clip

CW: Fatphobia, Having disorders.

Last Friday, Taylor Swift produced her new album, Midnight, in addition to a video clip for one particular of the album’s tracks, “Anti-Hero.” The song has been praised for its musicality and lyrics that portray a “deep self-loathing and question,” and what it is like to “have what appears like anything you could want, and even now experience depression’s insidious whispers,” as Juliet James, who identifies as excess fat, writes. Nevertheless, the movie for the music functions a perception in which “the ‘Anti-Hero’ edition of Swift, who obviously signifies her worst inner critic, has her get on a toilet scale. When the real Taylor appears down, the scale reads ‘FAT.’” 

Extra fat activists have observed that Swift is not fat (and has in no way been), and criticized her use of the phrase in a detrimental context alternatively of a neutral descriptor, noting how “someone who looks like Taylor will hardly ever realize how basically being fats feels. They could ‘feel unwanted fat,’ simply because our society has turned body dimensions into thoughts, and mainly because even thin gals are harmed by our society’s insidious and painful messaging about bodies, but it is not the same as actually remaining body fat.” Quite a few of these critics, like James, are cognizant of Swift’s admission of challenges with her overall body image, accusations of staying “too skinny,” and “comments speculating about her possibly becoming expecting, and how those people comments have resulted in her not having.” 

In the article James, along with numerous other critics, asks Swift to take away the term from the video—which the singer has considering that accomplished. Disseminating fatphobia, as this video did, hurts skinny people today also, and James writes that she “[dosen’t] want anybody to undergo from an ED, but excess fat folks have consuming diseases, as well, together with anorexia. We by now battle with acquiring treatment method for these likely lethal conditions ― our pleas for support are unheard, missing in the clamor of voices screaming about how our fatness itself is a disorder. We’re celebrated for dropping fat, even if we’re ― as Taylor explained she did ― efficiently starving ourselves, skipping meals or engaging in other unsafe behaviors.”

6. YouTube: Rihanna – Carry Me Up (Visualizer)

Rihanna has ultimately unveiled new songs following A long time! The guide solitary for Marvel’s Black Panther: Wakanda Without end, “Lift me Up” is the very first new songs we’ve gotten from the pop icon given that her aspect on PartyNextDoor’s 2020 “Believe It.” Right before that, we hadn’t gotten any songs from Rihanna considering that 2016’s ANTI. Co-prepared by Tems, Ludwig Göransson, and director Ryan Coogler, the song is a tribute to Chadwick Boseman, who died in 2020 from most cancers and played the Black Panther/King T’Challa in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. 

I’m curious to see what she will accomplish at the Superbowl. The hoopla is extremely authentic. 

7. YouTube: Angie Martinez IRL Podcast I Ashanti

Singer Ashanti has been in the information a lot around the past number of months, and not at her own behest. In August, Wager unveiled its Docuseries on Murda Inc, Ashanti’s former label. All through a Drink Champs job interview with N.O.R.E. and DJ EFN advertising and marketing the collection, label co-founder Irv Gotti alleged that Ashanti was his girlfriend and sexualized the singer, spoke of how he was upset that she was dating rapper Nelly, and comes off as jealous, bitter, and spiteful. Ashanti declined to be in the sequence. 

In this sit-down job interview with Angie Martinez, nevertheless, Ashanti addresses anything, outlining how “Irv was telling every person not to file with me” since of her romantic relationship with Nelly. Ashanti mentioned of Gotti’s modern habits that “it’s a small unfortunate to see a developed man perform himself in that way,” and described him as a “selfish” and “narcissistic” particular person, suggesting that he is “hurt” mainly because he no for a longer time has “control” about her. 

This interview is actually a prime instance of how a man in electric power used his position to halt the career of a woman. 

8. Selection: Leslie Jordan, ‘Will & Grace’ and ‘American Horror Story’ Star, Dies at 67 in Auto Incident

Actor, singer, writer, comic, and LGBT icon Leslie Jordan died on Monday morning when his vehicle crashed into the facet of a building. Reportedly, “it was suspected he suffered some sort of healthcare emergency.” He was 67. 

An Emmy Award winner, Jordan worked on a host of displays and motion pictures, most notably Will & Grace, American Horror Tale, and The Assist. Jordan’s social media movies ended up also extremely popular at the onset of the pandemic, delivering a hilarious reprieve through uncertain instances. Given that information broke of his loss of life, videos of Jordan have flooded social media as followers mourn his tragic death. 

9. The New Yorker: Mike Davis Could See the Foreseeable future

Marxist historian, activist, and organizer Mike Davis died this 7 days of esophageal cancer. He was 76. Davis was most recognised for his function on Los Angeles, a town he wrote of “as a totality—from the real-estate discounts of the mega-abundant to the squander-remedy plants, the electric power brokers to the unhoused and dispossessed, from the glamour of Hollywood to the cryptic graffiti of road gangs,” writes Hua Hsu. The influence of his function can be observed across disciplines, and although he was is “often misinterpret as a ‘prophet of doom,’ Davis was truly an optimist and a dreamer. He wasn’t gloating about the close of the world, so substantially as he was persuasive us to imagine a new just one.”

10. The Advocate: ‘It’s acts of God’: Mississippi River shrivels, leaving many to pray for rain

The Mississippi River is nearing history lows. Caused by decreased rainfall throughout the place, “the problem may not appreciably simplicity at any time quickly for the waterway that drains 41% of the contiguous United States and carries 60% of the country’s grain exports.” Very low levels additional north in the river could influence delivery, while in the south, consuming h2o is a concern as “the New Orleans area works by using the river as its source, but when the Mississippi is this lower, saltwater moves upstream from the Gulf.” To assistance assuage the problem, “the U.S. Military Corps of Engineers, or USACE is constructing a sill on the river bed near Myrtle Grove, La. to block the [saltwater] wedge from shifting upstream.”