Closing my tabs – 2025 04 06 – Dispatches from Dallas

Liberal Currents: Guys Win: Andrew Tate, Rape Politics, and the Authoritarian Right. The boys are not all right; they’re being lured into authoritarianism.
Interview: Claire Tabouret Designed the New Stained-Glass Windows at Notre-Dame. She’s Ready for the Blowback. I really wish I could see her designs or the windows in full. One day.
Vice: Wild Photos of Berlin’s Feminist Noise-Punk Scene. It did my heart good to read this and see the people.
The Guardian: Zadie Smith on the magic of Tracy Chapman: ‘She didn’t just look like us – she was singing our songs’. I’m not in the demographic they share, but I do love that album. What a lovely remembrance of that time and place.
Pajiba: Carrie Coon Ditched Marvel Because of Their Insulting Offer. Good for her.
BBC: The unexpected origins of Houston’s favourite po’ boy. I miss Antone’s. Gonna have to have one the next time I’m in town and maybe take some chow chow home.
Reactor: Repo Man: A Brash, Indelible, Outrageous Look at 1980s America. I loved this movie from the first time I saw it.
Status: Hanging by a Thread. Meta’s Twitter-killer mostly killed itself with early policy decisions. The interesting thing here is that since nobody is stuck with investment in Threads the way they are with Facebook, which really doesn’t have a similar-type rival, everybody just stopped posting there. And when I do log in, mostly what I see is people posting the same content as on other similar services (Bluesky).
Rolling Stone: Remembering the George Foreman Grill, Undisputed Champ of Nineties Fads. Fad, my ass. We still use ours!
The View from Rural Missouri by Jess Piper: You Are Going to Have to Tell Them the Truth. About public speaking (and running for office) in the red rural heartland.
Travel & Leisure: This Badass Woman Took the World’s First Road Trip—and Stole Her Husband’s Car to Do It. Bertha Benz (of Mercedes Benz) stole her husband’s invention and drove from Mannheim to Pforzheim with her teenage sons sometime in the 1880s or 1890s. This is a silly article but I’m more interested in Bertha after reading it.
Think Progress: What A 19th Century Campaign To Declare Mormons ‘Non-White’ Tells Us About Modern Islamophobia. The stories in this article sure sound like Greg Abbott talking about EPIC City!
NY Times: Hillary Clinton: How Much Dumber Will This Get? Still with her.
The Art Newspaper: ‘Mystery of a masterpiece’: how Van Gogh’s postman portrait ‘disappeared’ from London’s Tate Gallery a century ago. They didn’t like it, so it was returned and moved on, and now it’s at MOMA.
Texas Monthly: One of the Rarest of Texas’s Rare Plants Might Be Growing in Your Neighbor’s Garden. It’s wild big red sage, which I know nothing about because I’m absolutely garden ignorant and a black thumb.