Rhyme and No Reason

Rapper T.I. tunes listeners’ ears backward in time, to the end of the Civil Rights Movement and the death of Martin Luther King Jr., but also forward to our current time in which he believes white supremacy "is covertly done."

The Revolution That Got Televised

William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal were each other’s opposite because they were nearly identical twins in many respects. As a result, their 1968 confrontations would establish the template for televised political exchanges of the future.

Verse For the Worse

Lerner describes the “bitter logic” of poetry, where a gap always exists between what an individual poem strives to do (“the actual”) and the abstract potential of the medium of poetry itself (“the virtual”). But can that gap be responsible for the enmity many of feel toward poetry itself?

Land Mines and Punch Lines

Gallows humor is one thing, but at times Grunt succumbs to camp, which is to say it indulges in its own questionable taste.

Sweet Home Chicago

Fine as Garb's book about African American Chicago is, it does not quite come to terms with a critical shift in political perspective, or the instances in which victory proved to be more a constriction than culmination.

Discovering Mexican Literature of the United States

A keystone of the Chicano literature revival, along with a more recent novel about Mexican American social mobility, form a grand legacy awaiting our discovery.

Millennial Election Complacency

For almost all of my friends, this election was the first they could vote in. It was something special to see my friends cast their votes, urge others to do the same, and contribute to the making of America’s future. To finally be old enough to participate in the election,…

Dance and the Divided City

To anyone who asked, Katherine Dunham repeated a consistent message: training in the performing arts prepared people to face life’s problems. Too often, she felt, individuals wandered through life unaware of how the world worked and how they fit into it.

The Wire & The City

The Wire would not necessarily be described as a series about race. But that was the beauty of it.

Touring the Divided City

Neighborhoods United for Change frames St. Louis not just as a divided city, but also as one that yokes dispossession in North City to growth in South St. Louis, revealing how both North and South share similar goals.

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