The FADER Weekend Reading List

Albert Samaha, Mike Hayes, and Talal Ansari, BuzzFeed

Tons of research went into this piece about the Trump-era phenomenon of school children bullying their classmates by quoting the president's rude, self-serving, and racist statements. "Donald Trump’s campaign and election have added an alarming twist to school bullying, with white students using the president's words and slogans to bully Latino, Middle Eastern, black, Asian, and Jewish classmates. In the first comprehensive review of post-election bullying, BuzzFeed News has confirmed more than 50 incidents, across 26 states, in which a K-12 student invoked Trump’s name or message in an apparent effort to harass a classmate during the past school year." Scary.

Michael Arceneaux, The Root

Drama, drama, drama! The world is full of it these days. Arceneaux's write-up of the James Comey testimony touches on all the important points of the hearing, plus it's hilarious. "Shortly before taking his seat in front of the committee, Comey walked down the floor like Lurch about to cover Beyoncé. Comey could easily have thrown on a freakum dress because he absolutely performed as well as was hoped for by many watching."

Ben Dandridge-Lemco, The FADER

Since Hurricane Katrina, the owners and operators of NOLA's distinct party buses have created a thriving industry around their hometown sound: "New Orleans is a place of traditions, and its status as the birthplace of jazz is a constant point of emphasis at annual festivals and in tourism campaigns. But at today’s second lines, alongside the tuba and trumpet, another sound is just as prevalent — the unmistakeable samples, rapid drum patterns, and explicit chants of New Orleans bounce."

Stephanie Monohan, Real Life

"Horror as a genre has a long history of engaging with our anxieties about modernity and its violence," writes Monohan in her essay on digital fears and horror films. "More recent tech-horror tends to follow people who encounter a literal ghost in the machine — a vengeful spirit who haunts a telephone or computer, using the vessel to gain access to unsuspecting users and psychologically torturing them until they’re destroyed in the physical realm. In either case, the protagonists are punished for their curiosity, for giving in to the temptation to cross a physical or psychological boundary that is facilitated by their interaction with technology."

Linda Villarosa, The New York Times

We're far from solving racism and homophobia, and, this report from the Times shows, we're also still far from solving the HIV/AIDS crisis. "The crisis is most acute in Southern states, which hold 37 percent of the country’s population and as of 2014 accounted for 54 percent of all new H.I.V. diagnoses. The South is also home to 21 of the 25 metropolitan areas with the highest H.I.V. prevalence among gay and bisexual men. Jackson, the capital of Mississippi...has the nation’s highest rate — 40 percent — of gay and bisexual men living with H.I.V., followed by Columbia, S.C.; El Paso; Augusta, Ga.; and Baton Rouge, La. In Jackson, a small city of just over 170,000, half a dozen black gay or bisexual men receive the shock of a diagnosis every month, and more than 3,600 people, the majority of them black men, live with the virus."