The life of a refugee

I linked to this piece by Julia Ioffe in a link round-up recently, but I wanted to call it out again because it is a moving, beautiful piece of journalism:

[T]o most people watching the refugee crisis unfold, the refugees detained and turned back at airports across the country are likely abstractions, too. They do not see what brought them there or the bureaucratic Rube Goldberg machine they had to navigate to be deemed safe and responsible refugees.

I look at them and I see us, sitting in that strangely lit room with the Immigration and Naturalization Service officers who processed us and to whom, I’m sure, we were an abstraction, and who didn’t tell us that the way we transliterated our last name was stupid and that people would forever after think it began with lowercase L and not an uppercase I. But I think about that room and the refugee cards they filled out, cards we still have to this day, and what would have happened if we too had been turned back.

Where would we have gone? We were people without a home, without a country. We had been stripped of our Soviet citizenship, we had sold everything to pay the four steep fines for having four citizenships stripped from us, and we certainly didn’t have enough money left over for four plane tickets back, back to a country we no longer belonged to and wouldn’t have us. After all that paperwork and waiting, where would we go?

The truth about film critics 

One of my favorite writers, Nathan Rabin, has an astute piece up at Cracked enumerating 5 truths about film criticism. My favorite? Number 4:

Film Critics Are Not Influential Or Important Enough To Bribe: When DC Films endured vicious critical beatdowns for its massive comic book tentpoles Batman V. Superman: Dawn Of Justice and Suicide Squad, the internet was filled with ridiculous and angry accusations that Marvel was using its financial and corporate muscle to bribe critics into giving negative reviews to the work of its comic book archrival. If Marvel did bribe film critics into sabotaging DC Films’ commercial chances by giving negative reviews, they failed spectacularly. Oh sure, Batman V. Superman and Suicide Squad each garnered scathing reviews, but that didn’t seem to have much of an effect on their box office performances. People simply threw up their middle fingers and slapped down the cash.

Rabin captures how weirdly personal some of the attacks against critics can get. Readers often think of critics as elitist, which is rather bizarre given that the vast majority of film critics don’t make a high salary, and film criticism itself is a dying industry, with critics getting fired from major newspapers left and right.

The only thing I wish Rabin had called out a bit more is that there are a bunch of vocal outliers in the community. Film critics do make mistakes sometimes. They do sometimes judge movies unfairly. They do all sorts of things that sour the public’s perception of the profession. While outliers are by definition not representative of the community, they are a big reason why many of these misconceptions exist.

Well, that didn’t last long

Not too long ago I linked to a corporate profile of Odyssey, a content engine that relied on free and low-paid individuals to generate viral material. Turns out they haven’t nailed down the business model quite yet:

Digital media startup Odyssey has laid off 55 people, slashing over a third of its full-time, paid staff less than a year after raising $25 million, CEO Evan Burns confirmed to Business Insider.

This is a dramatic change for a company that board member Michael Lazerow described in April as being the most exciting company to him since he invested in BuzzFeed.

Asgar Farhadi and the Oscars

This week on Gen Pop, we talk with Siddhant Adlakha from Birth Movies Death about Trump’s Muslim ban and how it may impact art in the U.S.

We received this email about the show last night, and it really meant a lot to me (I’m sharing it anonymously, with permission):

Hi Joanna and Dave,

I just needed to tell you how much I love this podcast. I listen to A LOT of podcasts and this is quickly becoming my favourite. Every episode has been fascinating with brilliant discussions and interviews.

Your conversation with Sid Adlakha actually brought me to tears. I’m an interracial woman (my dad is half Somalian and half German and my Mum is a mix of Norwegian and Italian) but both my parents were born here in the UK. So I of course feel British through and through. With the horrors of Brexit and the rise of the Rightwing (everywhere it seems) I have had things said to me that I haven’t heard since the 90s. I felt we had moved past me being told to “Get back to the Paki Market” or being asked “What actually are you though?” But here I am crying at a podcast because it is so beautiful in its diverse voices and open discussion.

You should be so proud of yourselves for the outstanding work you are putting out.

I hope you enjoy the episode.