"The Dissident" brought audiences at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival to their feet, and many left in tears. Then the doc sat, untouched, for six months. Finally, a small company called Briarcliff Entertainment acquired it and made it available for rental online. It will be shown at movie theaters beginning March 11—in New Zealand.
My child-brain pictures a monster waiting to consume me, but black holes are not monsters. They are not even things. A black hole, explains astrophysicist Janna Levin, is nothing: “pure empty spacetime—no atoms, light, strings, or particles of any kind, dark or bright. It’s empty space—or, in physics slang, the vacuum.”
The German language invented the most complicated, somber, interesting words for life in a pandemic. And French added the most nuance. And Spanish emphasized sociability. As for us? Quite a few of our neologisms sound like a spoiled kid pouting.
Readers snapped up John Lutz’s police procedurals because they could tell he knew the details of police work. As a switchboard operator for St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department, he had listened to beat cops phoning in from call boxes. “That gave me insight into how they think,” he told me. “Police think they are aware of a depth of the dark side of human nature that other people can’t begin to imagine.”
Criticize their politics all you like, the French know how to savor life. Foibles that create delicious little whirls of scandal and drama here, they dismiss with an amused shrug. They save their energy for protecting their culture, their language—and now, their roosters.
Entanglement, an anthropological and journalistic account of the business, art, and meaning of hair across the globe, among other things, tells two contrasting stories.
Unlocking Our Locks: The Glory and Despair of Human Hair
Sisters Linnet Early Husi and Rosalind Early on natural hair in childhood, relaxers in adolescence, and growing up and into hairstyles that speak to who they are as Black women.
My baldness is not meant to signify anything, but it does not mean nothing, even to me.
Four portraits of modern tresses, and one toupee.