Features

The fact that our costume began as a sturdy and predictable garment, then evolved into a million variations and constant novelty—how American is that?

Freak Power: The Ballot or the Bomb is a brief portrait of a brilliant young writer, frustrated with his local and national governments, applying his beliefs to the practice of grassroots politics instead of keeping to the commentariat. For any young writers who wish to “write like Hunter S. Thompson,” or fans who love the Johnny Depp portrayal, the documentary will be instructive.

In almost any period in the past fifty years, Schottenheimer could have been cast as the “square” dad in a situation comedy. He was the quintessence of matter-of-factness, the earnest striver whose word was always good, but who would not have known the latest dance moves—or even the name of the latest dance. Marty Schottenheimer exhibited a strain of cheerful seriousness or serious good cheer, take your choice.

The woman who began her career as a fashion model for Ebony and Jet magazines, who married (and divorced) jazz trumpeter Miles Davis, and whose love of Black people, especially Black women, made her into an activist for most of her long, long life developed her craft so exactingly that she reigns as one of the greatest artists America has ever produced (or ever will produce).

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.”

Entanglement, an anthropological and journalistic account of the business, art, and meaning of hair across the globe, among other things, tells two contrasting stories.

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.

I have a print of Paul Goodnight’s “Links and Lineages” that depicts three generations braiding each other hair in a colorful tapestry of Black female intimacy and beauty. Such pleasures exist in many families. Mine—not so much.