Weekly Reader: Stories From Across Paste Media

By Jacob Weindling | September 19, 2025 | 3:52pm

Clockwise from top left: Photo of Guerilla Toss by by Ebru Yildiz, Photo of Jenny Lewis by Getty Images, Photo by Pierre Marshall, Photo by Cinemation Industries, Photo by Vile: Exhumed

Media Weekly Reader

Weekly Reader: Stories From Across Paste Media

In our dual bids to share interesting content worth reading and wage war against Google waging war against us, Paste Media has started doing a weekly roundup where each site in the Paste universe shares a story from all the other ones with their readers. Given that we have all been cobbled together out of the wreckage of 21st century media, some of our readers may not be familiar with the other good websites in this good website network, and it’s worthwhile sharing articles from it that we think our readers may like.

The legends over at The A.V. Club kicked this off a few weeks ago, then Jezebel put one together for their audience next, while EndlessMode handled it last week, meaning this week it’s time to tap into the Splinter audience to demonstrate how this once good website made good again is part of a network of good websites, starting with a terrific feature from The A.V. Club in their new limited series, Sounds of Blaxploitation, which will draw connections between music that backed the genre and the films that gave it a platform.

From The A.V. Club

Earth, Wind & Fire became Blaxploitation legends playing Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song by Craig D. Lindsey

The resulting soundtrack album was [Melvin] Van Peebles’ attempt to get the word out on his picture—inadvertently ensuring that future Blaxploitation movies would follow suit—by giving both consumers and radio stations a Black-made LP companion, released on the legendary Southern soul label Stax Records. But the soundtrack is just as much of an avant-garde pileup as the movie. It’s often overlooked how this defiant, down-and-dirty vision of ’70s Black America—something rarely seen on movie screens at the time—is also weird as fuck. A transgressive, psychedelic mashup of jump cuts, extreme zooms, random close-ups, odd visual effects, and other experimental film trickery, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song often makes you feel like you’re watching the hallucinations of a militant soul brotha on his first acid trip.

From Jezebel

God, It Felt Good to Be a Millennial at the Rilo Kiley Concert by Kady Ruth Ashcraft

The air held the faint promise of fall, perfect weather for rocking the type of layered outfit I would’ve dreamt up in the early aughts. Perhaps it was our collective ages (millennials and Gen-X’ers who once naively thought George W. Bush would be the worst president of our lifetime) or the fact that it was a Monday evening, but the energy was less a frenzied electricity and more a grounded glow—radiating from bodies softer than the ones we squeezed into American Apparel bodysuits twenty years ago. A full moon lit up the sky, and there might not have been an audience more appreciative of that fact. Whispers of “Wow, look at the moon” peppered the evening.

From EndlessMode

The Games Behind the Bans: Vile: Exhumed and Girls Purgatoriem by Grace Benfell

“I want to get this out of the way first. The fact that Valve barred Vile: Exhumed from sale on Steam is absurd. For one, the game is directly critical of “male entitlement,” keen-eyed about the mundane things that enable men to hurt and kill women. For another, it violates Steam’s guidelines only if you take an especially punitive and misunderstanding eye to it. Vile‘s banning underlines the impracticality of these measures. Who exactly are these bans protecting? Who are they targeting? Both Vile: Exhumed and Girls Purgatoriem are evidence that these bans deplatform real artists and narrow the things they can discuss. The least we can do is try to seek out this work and take it seriously.”

From Paste Magazine

Guerilla Toss Remains the Exception to the Rule by Casey Epstein-Gross

There is little a music critic loves more than a clear-cut trajectory. It makes our job easy: a band was this, and now they’ve become that. After all, besides the Christian right, who doesn’t love a narrative of evolution? And, luckily for me, Guerilla Toss has lived more lives in one decade than some bands do in four. Change is often inevitable and unavoidable, always catching up to us despite our attempts to run from it—yet the members of Toss have spent the last decade sprinting towards it, even when doing so felt like trying to move through tar. In other words: Sometimes change happens to you, but sometimes you have to work for it—and Carlson and co. have worked.

From Splinter

If Parents Are Free Not to Vaccinate Their Kids, Then I Should Be Free to Sue Them by Ross Pomeroy

In many ways, the legal case here mirrors that made in the involuntary manslaughter conviction of Jennifer and James Crumbley, whose 15-year-old son Ethan used a gun his father purchased for him to murder four of his classmates. The Crumbley’s negligently provided Ethan access to a firearm, ignored signs of their son’s troubled mental state, and left the gun unsecured. Parents who choose not to vaccinate their kids, then fail to recognize symptoms of vaccine-preventable diseases, then place their sick kids in situations where they could spread disease to others, are also negligent – not criminally, but certainly civilly.