One of the ironies of Afrofuturism is that it is less concerned with the future than it is the mythological reconstruction of a past that would enable Blacks to see themselves differently in the present. Whether the idealizations of Wakanda are ultimately debilitating or liberating for the Black mind and its struggles with persistent racial persecution and the enfeebling belief in Black inferiority is open to debate.
Watts’s lucid history of Rome’s “dangerous idea” makes clear that the problem is not so much that we do not remember the past, but that we remember the wrong things.
Courtesy Creative Commons Share Alike 3.0 ee I was in the library when I heard the young man talking on the phone: “I got our one-billion-dollar lottery ticket, so I feel like we have to be prepared. ‘What would you do?’ my wife asked me, but to…
In the Halloweens of my day, in a defunct little coal town in the Midwest, we had a hell of a good time.
Ross Gay’s point is that “joy and pain are fundamentally tangled up with one another.” What if, he says, joy is what bubbles forth when “we help each other carry our heartbreak?” To know that, though, we have to invite sorrow in. We welcome it with open (not crossed) arms. And once we stop resisting sorrow, guess what? We no longer resist or brush aside joy.
"Bosnian St. Louis" reminds us how beautiful Bosnia and Herzegovina was, and how readily people of different faiths and ethnic backgrounds intermarried and socialized. This small country with a mouthful of a name was first part of Yugoslavia—and it was the only Yugoslav republic established purely by geography and history, not ethnicity.
The experiences that are possible in Berlin are powerful and unsettling; they grab hold, forcing you to wrestle with them.
Behind the scenes of ‘True Grit’ with the Coens, by Jeff Bridges, courtesy of the artist I have always been a fan of Jeff Bridges’ acting but was surprised to learn this week he is an accomplished art photographer and sculptor whose work has appeared in Premiere and Aperture…
Diane von Furstenberg has always known she was meant to be here, meant to design. Back in high school, she was writing papers exploring beauty as a defense against death.
Researchers are not exactly sure how it will all play out. Some say that warmer temperatures will mean longer growing seasons, so a later start to fall foliage. Others say that if trees start photosynthesizing earlier, they may turn color sooner.