The FADER Weekend Reading List

A.V. Club staffers (10/26)

Check out the A.V. Club's list of the best horror films of the past decade for some terrifying viewing suggestions. Hits include It Follows, The Others, and The Ring. It's Halloween on Saturday, in case you forgot, so if you haven't been watching scary movies all week, you should get on that now.

Hannah Rose Ewens, Dazed (10/28)

This year, Canada became the first country to get rid of taxes on tampons. The U.K., Australia, and 45 out of 50 of the United States still have the tax. This seems really...wack. Reason number one is: you're getting taxed for having a uterus. As Ewens writes, "Guess what? Having a uterus isn’t a luxury—we didn’t opt-in to bleed every month." Preach. Incontinence products are untaxed but not tampons? Um... Take a look at this roundup of reasons the tampon tax is a joke. Guaranteed to both inform you, and make you mad.

Coral Davenport, Josh Haner, Larry Buchanan, and Derek Watkins, New York Times (10/26)

Here's a real life horror story: Greenland is disappearing. It's turning from ice into water. That's a whole goddamn country that's melting. WTF. The beautiful, haunting visuals in this NYT story ensure that the experience of reading it is truly scary.

Also from the Times this week is Betty Crocker’s Absurd, Gorgeous Atomic-Age Creations, an amazing story by Tamar Adler with interpretations of recipes by Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari.

Aimee Cliff, The FADER (10/30)

Ms. Cliff back at it again! This edition of Popping Off is on internet-consciousness in pop, exemplified by the contrast between Drake's "Hotline Bling" and Adele's "Hello." "'Hotline Bling' is a break-up song with a video you can’t help but screenshot, written for the generation who also can’t help but screenshot their break-up texts," Cliff writes, while "Adele sets her scene in a pre-social media universe: one in which she’s been calling the person she’s trying to reach on their landline for years (when I call you never seem to be home) and doesn’t even know if they live in the same place or not." On point.

Kent Russell, Highline x Huffington Post (10/29)

This shit is crazy. I was covered in goosebumps after reading the first line: "The men pack the witch’s mouth with rags. The time for confessions has come and gone." The story is about how people are tortured, burnt at the stake, decapitated, and dropped in the river as an execution for sorcery in Papua New Guinea. In this particular case, a 50-year-old woman was killed because she was blamed for the death of a her 6-year-old neighbor, who actually died of rheumatic fever. Pictures were proudly posted to social media, and that's when the journalists swarmed in to find out what the heck was going on. Kent Russell's unbelievable story is presented in 5 chapters by Highline in collaboration with the Huffington Post.

Alexander Iadarola, The FADER (10/29)

This week's GEN F is on Rabit, the industrial project by Houston producer Eric Burton. He speaks about what it's like to live as a gay man in a seriously conservative state, and how he wants to "cultivate non-conformity and resistance to the power structures conditioning us through mental poisoning." Noise, pleasure, and pain define the new Rabit record, Communion. It's dope as hell, as are Eva Tuerbl's portraits, and Iadarola's words.

Rory Carroll and Mae Ryan, The Guardian (10/30)

This, no joke, may be the scariest damn haunted house I've ever heard of. When you opt-in (and by opt-in I mean pay) for the 8-hour tour of McKamey Manor (named for its founder, Russ McKamey), you basically get the living shit kicked out of you. People have panic attacks, almost drown, get dragged around by their hair, stomped on, and forced to eat their own vomit. It's a circus of horrors run by masochists with a 27,000 person waiting list. It's been around for a decade, and no one has ever made it through the full 8 hours. It's like Saw x Hostel x House Of 1,000 Corpses, but IRL. Fully twisted.

Michelle Lhooq, THUMP (10/30)

Pictureplane's new album, Technomancer (which is a "sci-fi term for technology-related magical abilities," according to Lhooq) dropped today. It's all dark and synthy, which is perfect for Halloween weekend, of course. The DJ/producer talked to THUMP about how his record is inspired by Hakim Bey's Temporary Autonomous Zones (1991), and what spell to use to hex a corporation this weekend. 😈