Introducing TV’s Best Female Monster Yet, Lili Loofbourow, New York Magazine, July 3, 2014
In horror, once a person has been cast as a victim, a victim they remain — or at best, a deeply damaged survivor. In Orphan Black, the victim becomes the monster becomes the victim again with bewildering and humorous ease. Just when you think you’ve settled, the camera cocks its head, says “don’t be baby,” and refuses to let things be so simple. The camera confounds our relationship to Helena by seesawing the horror script, and in doing so, makes us rethink what a female monster can be. You’re forced to shift your sympathies on a shot-by-shot basis.
Judge says man who raped sleeping woman is not a “classic rapist,” just “lost control”, Katie McDonough, Salon, July 3, 2014
Our culture’s failure to acknowledge rape as rape — even when a victim is intoxicated, even when a victim has a sexual history with his or her rapists, even when the rapist looks like such a nice guy with such a promising future — is also the reason that we’re so dismissive of genuine attempts to reform the system. The general response to a California measure on affirmative consent was either a dramatic eye-roll about progressivism run amok or outright anger. As if minimal efforts to ensure that the person you want to have sex with wants to have sex with you were feminist hysteria or the end of freedom as we know it. Every month a new column gets written that uses the same callous tone and boring talking points about “regretted sex” to dismiss the first campaign against sexual assault to be taken on by a sitting president and frame the activism that has emerged in response to epidemic levels of sexual assault on college campuses as a threat to the career prospects of perpetrators.
What you know about July 4th is wrong, Valerie Strauss, Washington Post, July 2, 2014
You learned in school about what happened in July 1776, and think you have a good handle on events surrounding American independence from Great Britain. Right?
Well, if you think that was the day that America’s independence was declared by the Continental Congress meeting in Philadelphia, you are wrong.
And if you think that that was the day that members of the Congress signed the new Declaration of Independence, as depicted in a famous canvas painting by John Trumbull, (which now hangs in the Rotunda of the Capitol of the United States), you are wrong.
And if you think that Thomas Jefferson alone wrote the Declaration of Independence, or the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia was made to ring to announce independence, or that Betsy Ross sewed the first American flag at the request of George Washington, you are wrong, wrong and wrong. And if you never learned about George Washington’s own declaration, that’s another gap in your historical knowledge.
