Social Issues

Die, or Get Better?

June 6, 2020 Chris SunamiIdentity

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[…]

“We All Try”: Philosophical Music

May 16, 2019May 16, 2019 Chris SunamiChristian Existential Humanism

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[…]

Image: "Swamp Patrol" by Roger Blum

A Statistic of One

April 18, 2019March 30, 2019 Chris SunamiPoetry

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

April 4, 2019March 30, 2019 Chris SunamiLiterature

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[…]

Image by Nishant Goswami

Pirates of the Caribbean II: Dead Man’s Chest

March 28, 2019March 29, 2019 Chris SunamiCompetition

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[…]

Trump vs Obama: America’s A/B Experiment

February 28, 2019December 13, 2019 Chris SunamiPolitics

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[…]

We Invented the Remix, Part II

November 8, 2018November 7, 2018 Chris SunamiHip Hop

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[…]