James Baldwin & American Democracy
Ten original essays, with preface and introduction, on the relevance of James Baldwin's thought and writings.
Ten original essays, with preface and introduction, on the relevance of James Baldwin's thought and writings.
The rudimentary web page “Spend Bill Gates’ Money” is at neal.fun, a site that also includes “Progress,” which counts down everything from the next minute to when the Milky Way will collide with Andromeda; “Life…
Dave Chappelle’s new standup special, Sticks & Stones, has been getting attention for setting out to be provocative in the #MeToo era.
“If you say anything, you risk everything,” Morgan Freeman says in the Netflix trailer.
Chappelle says he is sick of PC scrutiny: “That’s why I don’t be coming…
The 2019 documentary American Factory is about a Chinese glass company that opened a factory in the United States. The film is good enough to be, well, lacerating at times.
When a GM plant closed in 2008 in Dayton, 10,000 people lost their jobs. The repurposing of the plant by…
The “When I’m 64 Beatles Festival” was held this weekend in Prairietown, Illinois, “a populated place located within the Township of Omphghent,” not far from St. Louis.
It was a perfect day for it, 75 and sunny. Butch Moore and Alan White, who are often performing…
If you look back through my blog, you will see I was in Japan this summer. For some reason, before I went I guess I thought many restaurants outside of the tourist quarters would serve portions an American might find small, and there would always be rice, and while the…
The Common Reader remembers the iconic African-American novelist Toni Morrison in this 1995 interview: "Black writing has to carry that burden of other people’s desires, not artistic desires but social desires; it’s always perceived as working out somebody’s else’s agenda. No other literature has that weight."
Humans have long seen nature as a monster. We have tried our banded-together best to destroy it but cannot stop thinking about creatures that never stood a chance against us. The idea of a seven-foot hominid wandering around Texarkana, or the Pacific Northwest, or the Himalayas, is an aftertaste of our fear and hope that such things are still possible.
“The standing apology for women who become writers without any special qualification is that society shuts them out from other spheres of occupation. Society is a very culpable entity, and has to answer for the manufacture of many unwholesome commodities, from bad pickles to bad poetry."