T Lo’s Weekend Pop Culture Reading List

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Kittens, if you feel like getting caught up on the zeitgeist or just distracted from your cares and woes this weekend, we recommend the following articles, stories and essays, all of which caught our eyes and tickled our fancies this week.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute is preparing to unveil the exhibit “In Pursuit of Fashion: The Sandy Schreier Collection” on November 27 as part of The Met’s 150th anniversary, taking place next year. The exhibit (slated to run through May 17, 2020) celebrates Schreier’s dedication to keeping some of the most important pieces of fashion history, which she has never worn, in the finest condition. Schreier will be gifting much of her prestigious collection to the Met, 80 pieces of which have been chosen for this exhibition, including womenswear, accessories and fashion illustrations.

The Met’s Costume Institute to Showcase Collection of Film Buff Fashion Historian by Nadia Neophytou at The Hollywood Reporter

The photographer’s once-taboo images have lost their power to shock, and feed into outworn stereotypes, a critic argues. Thirty years after Robert Mapplethorpe’s death, the legend still obscures the photographs.

Has Robert Mapplethorpe’s Moment Passed? by Arthur Lubow at The New York Times

These ‘getting-ready’ garments are practical, affordable, and look great in Instagram photos.

The Growing Popularity of the Bridesmaid Robe. by Daisy Alioto at The New York Times

Although it may seem like a 21st century feminist punk fever dream, this full-contact whirlwind on wheels has roots stretching back nearly a century.

The Long and Surprising History of Roller Derby by Jennifer Harlan at The New York Times

Traditional animation, by contrast, has the line, which shivers and shakes and strikes with the passion of the person creating it. Much as the brushstrokes of a painting can create a psychic connection with the artist who made them, line drawings still convey the power of an individual’s hand; they have a rough, human vitality. Somebody, we sense, created these pictures, and now the pictures are coming to life. Disney animator T. Hee once told a story about walking in on his colleague Bill Tytla while the latter was drawing the character of the Devil from the “Night on Bald Mountain” sequence of Fantasia. Tytla was so intensely wrapped up in his work, so possessed of a demonic fervor, that Hee quietly scurried out of the room. Watch the scene in question from Fantasia, and you can sense that energy emanating from the screen.

Bring Back the Animation by Bilge Elbiri at Vulture

A new book argues that our richest, most eloquent language is found online.

Is the Internet Making Writing Better? by Katy Waldman at The New Yorker

When Orange Is the New Black debuted back in 2013, it was one of the first original series created by Netflix—then best known as a mail-order-DVD company. The prison dramedy was focused on society’s most marginalized voices—black and Latino women, queer and trans women, drug addicts, rape survivors, and the mentally ill—and its debut helped usher in a new era for its home platform, as well as TV more broadly.

How Orange Is the New Black Changed TV for Good by Paul Chi at Vanity Fair

“Her attention to detail and master tailoring has always left me feeling confident and beautiful, no matter what I’m wearing,” Obama said of Christy Rilling.

Michelle Obama’s Longtime Tailor Creates Bespoke Fashion Collection by Michael Cooper at The Hollywood Reporter

“The Crane Wife” is a story from Japanese folklore. I found a copy in the reserve’s gift shop among the baseball caps and bumper stickers that said GIVE A WHOOP. In the story, there is a crane who tricks a man into thinking she is a woman so she can marry him. She loves him, but knows that he will not love her if she is a crane so she spends every night plucking out all of her feathers with her beak. She hopes that he will not see what she really is: a bird who must be cared for, a bird capable of flight, a creature, with creature needs. Every morning, the crane-wife is exhausted, but she is a woman again. To keep becoming a woman is so much self-erasing work. She never sleeps. She plucks out all her feathers, one by one.

The Crane Wife by CJ Hauser at The Paris Review

Now that you’re finished binge-watching season two of The Crown, it’s time to think ahead to season three. Here’s what we know so far about the third installment of Peter Morgan’s take on Queen Elizabeth II’s reign.

The Crown Will Reportedly Return in November. Tobias Menzies let the news slip in a recent interview. by Caroline Halleman at Town & Country/p>

It didn’t take long before it became clear that what resonated at Mic was left-leaning “social justice clickbait,” a former senior editor said. In 2013, Mic launched an Identities vertical, which was “dedicated to examining the intersections of sexuality, gender, class and race in politics and culture for the millennial generation.” Just writing about a topic of interest to readers wasn’t enough, however. Mic posts had to be packaged in tight, engaging manners meant to maximize shares on Facebook. A listing for the Identities section in 2013 said Mic was looking for unpaid writers who would be open to “incorporating multimedia (video, GIFs, photos, memes, etc.)” in posts.

The Fall of Mic Was a Warning by Maxwell Strachan at HuffPost

[Photo Credit: Nicholas Alan Cope/The Metropolitan Museum of Art]

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