Dialogic Cinephilia - May 17, 2020

Baldwin, Alec and Julie Brown. "The Epstein Story Did Not Just Happen Overnight." On the Media (July 10, 2019) ["Julie Brown of the Miami Herald conceived, reported, and wrote one of the most explosive criminal justice stories in recent memory. She revealed the shutting down of an FBI investigation that may have been on the verge of discovering the full extent of a child-sex-trafficking operation run by politically-connected billionaire Jeffrey Epstein. The prosecutor allegedly behind that decision, Alex Acosta, is now President Trump's Secretary of Labor. Acosta offered Epstein a plea deal in which Epstein pleaded guilty to recruiting underage girls for sex and spent about a year in the local lockup, with work release. The deal also proactively protected from prosecution any potential co-conspirators. Brown pored over internal emails to see exactly how Acosta and other powerful law-enforcement officials made these decisions."]

Bazelon, Emily and Jena Griswold. "'Can Democracy Survive the Pandemic': : Election Hangs in the Balance as Trump Attacks Mail-In Voting." Democracy Now (May 15, 2020) ["The coronavirus pandemic poses unprecedented challenges to the November presidential election, as President Trump and the GOP capitalize on the moment to attack voting rights. We speak with Emily Bazelon, staff writer at The New York Times Magazine, whose new cover story examines the bureaucratic and political challenges of mobilizing widespread vote-by-mail by November. We also speak with Jena Griswold, secretary of state of Colorado, which already has universal vote-by-mail and the second-highest voter turnout in the country."]

Dixon, Wheeler Winston. "The 21st Century Plague: Cinema in the Age of COVID-19." Senses of Cinema #94 (April 2020)

Booth, Max, III. "Fun in the Funhole: Exploring Kathe Koje's Cipher." LitReactor (February 19, 2018)

Hudák, Tomáš.  "Slowly Diving from Reality Into Fantasy: A Conversation with João Pedro Rodrigues." Senses of Cinema #94 (Spring 2020)

Koski, Genevieve, et al. "Print the Legend, Part 1 - Velvet Goldmine." The Next Picture Show #184 (July 9, 2019) ["Martin Scorsese’s new ROLLING THUNDER REVUE takes a documentary-esque approach to Bob Dylan’s titular 1970s tour-slash-roadshow, blending fact and fiction in a manner reminiscent of Todd Haynes’ 1998 cult favorite VELVET GOLDMINE, which creates a similar sort of parallel fiction around an extraordinary moment in music history. In this half of our pairing looking at “print the legend” musical histories, we focus on VELVET GOLDMINE and its dense, post-modern approach to crafting an ersatz Bowie biopic, debating the advantages and disadvantage of doing a fictionalized history of a real movement, and whether it matters that Bowie himself did not approve."]

---. "Print the Legend, Part 2 - Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story." The Next Picture Show #185 (July 16, 2019) ["Our look at musical films that willfully straddle the line between fact and fiction brings in Martin Scorsese’s newest effort for Netflix, ROLLING THUNDER REVUE: A BOB DYLAN STORY, to see how it applies that MO to a documentary format, where Todd Haynes’ VELVET GOLDMINE applied it to a narrative one. After debating to what extent ROLLING THUNDER REVUE tells us anything about its slippery subject, we bring these two films together to see how they each play with ideas about alter-egos and disposable identities, what they have to say about art and commerce, and how each reflect their 1970s setting."]

Phillips, Whitney. "The Toxins We Carry." Columbia Journalism Review (Fall 2019) ["Disinformation is polluting our media environment. Facts won’t save us."]

"The Sexiest Erotic Novels of All Time." Esquire (March 29, 2017)

Wagner, Brigitta. "Women’s Cinematic Heights in Times of Covid: An Interview with Eliza Hittman." Senses of Cinema #94 (April 2020)