Quickies
Quickies: Psychics and the Truth, the Boys Club of Animation, and Fact-Checking Nonfiction Books
- ‘Jesus, Don’t Let Me Die Before I’ve Had Sex’ – “In the forthcoming documentary Give Me Sex Jesus, the filmmakers Matt Barber and Brittany Machado tell personal stories of struggle from within the Evangelical Christian community to remain sexually pure until marriage.”
- Seeing Freedom in Their Future, Psychics Reveal All: ‘It’s a Scam, Sir’ – Psychics, convicted of crimes, sit before the parole board and say what they really think about their professions. These confessions won’t shock you at all!
- Inside The Persistent Boys Club Of Animation – “Women who have worked in animation for anywhere from a few years to six decades talked to BuzzFeed News about how things have gotten better — and how they haven’t.”
- Eva Longoria Spotlights Violet Palmer Through ESPN Short Video “Versus” – “The documentary series focuses on inspiring moments in sports, especially those that happen off the field or court.” Watch this video to learn more about Queen Vee, the first female referee in the NBA! From Radium.
- Man dude givesticles men direrections bro he ball? – SMBC’s take on the masculination of language. Ha!
- Bringing Down America’s Happiest Christian Cult – “For decades, the freewheeling hippies of Jesus People USA —’God’s forever family’ — forged one of the most influential movements in Christianity. They were also Jaime Prater’s family, until he made a documentary exposing the commune’s darkest secrets.”
- Book Publishing, Not Fact-Checking – “Readers might think nonfiction books are the most reliable media sources there are. But accuracy scandals haven’t reformed an industry that faces no big repercussions for errors.”
Is it typical to mock convicts during parole hearings? I guess I don’t know much about the tone, but that seems like the wrong time to be cracking jokes. Also I think parole hearings are going to give you the answer the parole board wants to hear, not the truth. After all they may recant fortune telling, but how often do they praise having found Jesus? Reading this I was wondering if they would mock an evangelical revival preacher the same way.
On fact-checking. I tried to read James Frey before the balloon burst, in fifteen minutes I knew that he was an unreliable narrator. His story was tailored to the expectations of a large audience, so it was swallowed whole.
In a more sinister vein. It was only when the pseudo-historian David Irving sued Deborah Lipstadt for libel that his writing were FIRST subject to critical review. On historian-witness at the trial testified that he could not honestly testify to Irving’s accuracy on ANY point without every, single source at hand. No reference made by Irving could be trusted without direct comparison. The judge found that every word that Irving had ever written, all the way back to his first book in 1963, was driven by his devotion to fascism and his desire to exonerate the Nazis.
But to this day, Irving’s fictional claims about the scale of the Dresden bombing are repeated as fact. The death toll Irving claimed was arrived at by adding a zero to the end of each number in the Nazi government’s report.
I like how Irving said “I’m not a Holocaust historian, I’m a Hitler historian.” That always reminded me of the people who try to divorce the Civil War from slavery. Some acts have such a degree of vileness that they color your opinion of the actor.
Mary,
I’m glad to hear at least some physics are admitting that they don’t have any physic powers. If only now we could find a way to get them to do so in large numbers without threatening them with prison.
The difference between a psychic and a magician is, with the latter, everyone knows it’s an illusion. Magicians tend to encourage skepticism, psychics…their entire livelihood depends on the kayfabe.