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Reactions to links and stories from around the web.

Post image for Female Suicide as Fashion, Courtesy Vice Magazine

Let’s start at the beginning. Vice magazine recently published a fashion spread from its new Women in Fiction issue. Titled “Last Words,” it features seven models posed as female writers who committed suicide (or in one case, attempted to) at the moment of their deaths.

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Post image for White Womens’ Bodies as Selfie-Objectified Tools of Dissent

CHICAGO — “Even if you’re not doing anything wrong, you’re being watched and recorded,” 29-year-old spy Edward Snowden told the Guardian last Sunday, openly identifying himself as the whistleblower on the NSA PRISM program, which he alleged is gathering communications data not just from foreigners, as officials previous said, but on a vast domestic scale. Nine major internet companies, including Google, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo! and Facebook are all named as offering up data, according to DemocracyNow. We are all being watched, and now we know it.

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Post image for The $31M Lady Gaga Plagiarism Suit We’ve All Been Waiting For

Lady Gaga has been accused of plagiarizing from many artistic sources: Canadian-Ukranian artist Taras Polataiko, New York performance artist Colette, and Canadian artist Jana Sterbak, to name a few. But now someone’s finally going the extra step and suing her.

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Post image for Shoot for the Stars: First GIF Shared in Space

To launch a project that will crowdsource digital media projected into space, it makes sense to start with a GIF, the most beloved manifestation of our current internet noise. Today the first GIF to ever be sent into space started a journey to a distant solar system — which it will reach in 2031.

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Post image for Unpaid Interns Fight Back

In a big victory for unpaid internship lawsuits, a federal judge ruled last Tuesday that two interns who worked on the movie Black Swan for Fox Searchlight Pictures should have been paid. Federal District Court Judge William H. Pauley III sided with the former interns, Eric Glatt and Alexander Footman, “because they were essentially regular employees,” the New York Times reports. It’s not quite be the nail in the coffin for unpaid internships yet, but it’s progress.

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Post image for Three Takes on the Art Basel “Rioters”

Over the weekend, a group of 100 or so activists protesting Tadashi Kawamata and Christophe Scheidegger’s “Favela Café” were teargassed at Art Basel. The café, in attempting to mimic the desperate conditions of Brazil’s tragic slums, meant to bring introspection and perspective to Art Basel’s air of orgiastic excess — a project not unlike building a waterslide on the sun.

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ReactorWeekend

Required Reading

by Hrag Vartanian on June 16, 2013

Post image for Required Reading

This week, the Venice Biennale makes the art world go round, a new accessibility icon, Starry Night explained, Warhol inspired Dior, James Turrell overload, and more.

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ReactorWeekend

Weekend Words: Crash

by Weekend Editors on June 16, 2013

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Weekend Words looks at crashes past with an eye toward a crash-free future.

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Post image for David Byrne’s Bad Advice to Columbia’s Visual Arts MFA Grads

On the second track of David Byrne’s last album with the Talking Heads, he told the story of Mr. Jones, a pyrotechnic jack-of-all trades, “everybody’s friend,” straddling the creative universe of “rock stars” and the hum-drum of “conventioneers.” But when Byrne took to the stage last week, all wire-rimmed spectacles and club collars, to deliver Columbia’s Visual Arts MFA commencement speech, it wasn’t exactly yesteryear’s “big day for Mr. Jones” for the attending graduates.

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Post image for Building Parity: On Women Architects

LOS ANGELES – Too many documentaries on architecture feature the same faces, and they’re mostly male. Same goes for panel discussions, lectures, and exhibits. The new documentary Coast Modern does a better job, yet there’s still far to go.

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