- Why is the internet so skewed against Amber Heard in her court battle with Jonny Depp? Kaitlyn Tiffany spoke with experts for the Atlantic:
One could blame “the Deppford Wives” for all these online smears, but that’s not exactly right. Some of the most active commenters aren’t so much determined fans of Johnny Depp as anti-fans of Amber Heard.
Hilde Van den Bulck, a professor of communication at Drexel University, has studied the version of fandom that inverts its practices and creates a community of denigration. Where fandom tends to derive from a positive emotion (I love this actor; I love that character), anti-fandom draws from just the opposite, and nurtures negative feelings toward a famous person or character. Fans and anti-fans both express themselves through online sleuthing: They hang on the object of their fascination’s every word, and analyze every detail of that person’s wardrobe and hairstyling and self-presentation. “Anti-fans know as much about their object of anti-fandom as fans do about their object of fandom,” Van den Bulck said. Their relationship with the celebrity they despise is “often very deep, very emotional.”
Some anti-fans are disillusioned former fans (I used to love celebrity X, but now … ). Others’ hatred may be unprovoked (I just can’t stand celebrity X, and resent their place in public life). In many situations, as Van den Bulck explains it, anti-fans and fans are overlapping groups: The anti-fan of celebrity X hates celebrity X because celebrity X harmed celebrity Y, of whom the anti-fan is a fan.
- Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib introduced a historic resolution recognizing the Palestinian Nakba (the term Nakba refers to the displacement of Palestinians from their homes with the establishment of Israel in 1948.) The resolution reads:
Resolved, That it is the sense of the House of Representatives that it is the policy of the United States to—
(1) commemorate the Nakba through official recognition and remembrance;
(2) reject efforts to enlist, engage, or otherwise associate the United States Government with denial of the Nakba;
(3) encourage education and public understanding of the facts of the Nakba, including the United States role in the humanitarian relief effort, and the relevance of the Nakba to modern-day refugee crises;
(4) continue to support the provision of social service to Palestinian refugees through the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East; and
(5) support the implementation of Palestinian refugees’ rights as enshrined in United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194 and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
You can see how passing this resolution won’t be easy.
- Meanwhile, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who sponsored Tlaib’s resolution, confirmed to the Insider that she got engaged to her longtime partner Riley Roberts:
“Yep! It’s true,” Ocasio-Cortez told Insider of an unconfirmed report that she and Roberts were engaged.
She added on Twitter that they got engaged in Puerto Rico last month and were “taking some space to savor” their engagement before beginning the wedding planning process.
“We got engaged last month in my family’s hometown in Puerto Rico,” she tweeted. “No future details yet, we’re taking some space to savor this time before diving into planning.”
How did they meet, you ask?
Ocasio-Cortez, 32, met Roberts, a marketing professional, when the two were undergraduate students at Boston University. They’ve dated for several years.
Roberts has largely stayed out of the spotlight but was featured in a 2018 documentary, “Knock Down the House,” about Ocasio-Cortez’s primary campaign. The documentary’s filmmaker, Rachel Lears, told Insider in 2019 that Roberts played a key role in supporting his partner’s political career.
“Everything from the emotional to the strategic to the practical, he has been a really important partner to her,” she said.
Roberts and Ocasio-Cortez met at Boston University’s Coffee and Conversation in 2011 — a Friday-afternoon student town hall where Ocasio-Cortez often drove discussions — but friends of the couple didn’t know they had been dating until years after they all graduated.
- A very telling Freudian slip from war criminal and former US President George W. Bush. As always with Bush, you don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
- Kate Eichhorn writes for Literary Hub about the “rise of Insta-artists and Insta-poets.” It’s depressing. Here’s an excerpt:
In the 2020s, if you want to be a successful artist or writer, you don’t necessarily need cultural or social capital or even a preexisting body of art or writing to succeed. What matters most is your content capital.
Like cultural capital (a person’s social assets, which include but are not limited to their educational credentials and style) and social capital (a person’s social networks or sphere of influence), content capital—the ability to create content about oneself online—is important because it opens doors to greater success, access, celebrity, and wealth. It is essentially another type of intangible asset that influences one’s social mobility. But this may be where the similarities between content capital and other types of capital end.
Unlike cultural and social capital, which tend to be restricted by one’s class or economic status, content capital is much easier to acquire. You don’t need to be able to pay for a private-school education or access to rarified cultural institutions to acquire content capital. One can build up a tremendous amount of content capital by simply hanging out online and posting popular content that leads to more followers and, in turn, more influence.
- A contemporary Egyptian man meets his ancient Egyptian doppelganger:
- A poignant message from artist Barabara Kruger on the pages of the New York Times:
- What does Apple’s futuristic car remind you of? I recommend looking at the thread below the tweet.
- And finally, this:
Required Reading is published every Thursday afternoon, and it is comprised of a short list of art-related links to long-form articles, videos, blog posts, or photo essays worth a second look.
