In these days of pandemic, American democracy lies sick, burning not with fever but with fire. Every illness must come to one end or the other. Will she die, or will she get better? The[…]
Category: Social Issues
“We All Try”: Philosophical Music
Repost from 2015 Hip-hop singer Frank Ocean is well-known to march to the beat of a different drummer, and nowhere is that more apparent than in We All Try, a lovely and plaintive existential humanist[…]
A Statistic of One
This is a repost of a powerful poem by my late uncle John Gilmore, who was a US Marine in Vietnam, a substance-abuse counselor in civilian life, and a gifted poet in both realms. A[…]
Long Division
I first encountered author Kiese Laymon when I read his essay “You are the Second Person,” an unapologetically bridge-burning reckoning of his encounter with a assimilationist editor who tried to deracinate his work. What stuck[…]
Pirates of the Caribbean II: Dead Man’s Chest
The second Pirates movie was an entertaining romp, with some great action sequences, featuring the always-compelling Johnny Depp. However, the film also featured a disturbing racial subtext. Most blatantly, the film trafficked in broad racial[…]
Animated Parables of a Broken World
It’s the 30th anniversary of three short animated films I saw when they were new, and never forgot. Some images can stick with you for a lifetime. When I was a teenager, in the late[…]
Trump vs Obama: America’s A/B Experiment
There’s only one lens through which the Trump presidency makes actual sense: As a self-organizing A/B experiment in sociology, carried out on the grandest of scales. The A part of the experiment was a man[…]
Roma-nticized
I want to preface this by saying Alfonso Cuaron is a genius. Not only did he write and direct Children of Men, my own pick for top film ever, he also wrote and directed Y[…]
Dear Dems, Impeach Trump Today (and again tomorrow if necessary)
It’s no accident that the rhetoric around Trump has shifted from “he’ll be impeached the moment the Democrats take the House” to “oh, it would be a mistake to impeach him, we don’t have the[…]
We Invented the Remix, Part II
Last time, we looked at hip-hop sampling as a outgrowth of African polyphony, a way of creating something new by placing a different and contrasting line over the original. But there is more to it[…]