“Every medium — print, TV, social media — has its own contract with the truth,” writes media ecologist Andrey Mir. He goes on to explain how our media gradually shattered the very notion that there is truth—singular, shared, floating above us all, letting us aspire to reach it…
The untitled photograph is not merely a breach between memory and hope, but rather an invitation to inhabit that breach from a distance.
In “Warm Summers and Cold Winters,” Steven P. Gietschier tells the story of Charley and Bill DeWitt, owners of the perennial American League losers, the St. Louis Browns, who, in 1950, decided to hire a psychologist and hypnotist named Dr. David Tracy to help some of the players get over their “inferiority complex.”
Richard Wright has in common with Thomas Hardy that the plots in his fiction are sometimes intricate to the point of distraction, and the events he depicts are often sensational, sometimes to a fault. His novels published after “Native Son” have much to recommend them. Still, “Native Son” and “Black Boy” stand as his most enduring achievements. They capture the isolation from mainstream society that is the reality of many young Black people, in the time of Wright’s youth and in our time.
A.M. Gittlitz’s “Metropolitans” tells an alternative history of the New York Mets through the lens of class struggle. Extensive and educational, entertaining and exasperating, it employs the team as a vehicle of left-wing politics, while prodding at the cultural conservatism associated with the national pastime.
The online haters celebrating what they gleefully consider its downfall simplify the matter in the way such misogynists always do: “Supergirl” 2026, in their view, is simply a bad film. The problem with this perspective is that “Supergirl” 2026 is not a bad film.
When the music started from behind us without any musician ever setting up a music stand on the altar in front of us, I realized I had not thought this thing through very far.
What I love are the ways the show has succeeded. Not because it is storybook happy, but because the audience response proves we are better than I thought we were. We hunger to hear a coach or boss tell us winning isn’t everything. We thirst for integrity and principle, forgiveness and kindness.
He had me at the name. Richard J. Powell has written a gorgeous book about Black artists and their use of color, and every page leaps up at you, jolting you into attention.
After the most gruesome, tough assignments...I went shopping.