Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Up until a few weeks ago, I worked at a historic site in the South that included an old house and a nearby plantation. My job was to lead tours and tell guests about the people who made plantations possible: the slaves. The site I worked at most frequently had more than 100 enslaved workers…
When Facebook released its workplace diversity numbers on Thursday, the company included a somewhat heartening message. “It’s clear to all of us that we still aren’t where we want to be,” Maxine Williams, Facebook’s global head of diversity, wrote. “There’s more work to do.” But it was almost exactly the same thing Ms. Williams said…
Photo George Takei Credit Andrew T. Warman for The New York Times You’re very busy for someone your age. You’ve written three books; you have a web series; and your musical, “Allegiance,” based on your family’s time in an internment camp during World War II, will debut on Broadway in November. As a matter of…
Actors Tony Revolori, Kiersey Clemons and Shameik Moore in Dope David Moir /sl-art-illo-cap /sl-art-illo-cntr First, let’s get this out of the way. Dope is a good movie. It is enjoyable, watchable and sweet. But it is also so sweet that if it were a drink, it would be a hipster, artisan rum punch drowning in…
Coming-of-age stories are about going through something defining. Movies like The Breakfast Club endure because the experiences they capture, like grappling with identity or awkward sexuality, are meant to be universal, signposts that mark the moments where we quit being kids. Resolution comes as each character — our teenaged avatars — take those first steps…
“Dope” begins with an onscreen definition, which is a known characteristic of satires that ultimately fail in their satiric visions. Usually, these films open with a definition of satire, which they don’t live up to by the closing credits. “Dope” opts instead for Webster’s take on its title, defining it as slang for a stupid…
Photo From left, Tony Revolori, Kiersey Clemons and Shameik Moore in “Dope.” Credit Rachel Morrison/Open Road Films A coming-of-age story that is at once a parody of, and a tribute to, ’90s-vintage ghetto dramas, “Dope” wears its pop-culture obsessions on its sleeve. So does its hero, Malcolm (Shameik Moore), a teenager navigating his senior year…
How do young black men see themselves in America today? This is the formidable question buried under the high-top fades and Cross-Colour jeans of Rick Famiyuwa’s natty new film Dope. It’s the story of Malcolm, a retro-obsessed hip-hop geek with Harvard aspirations navigating senior year in a rough section of Inglewood, California. He and fellow…
Alleged Charleston gunman Dylann Roof wrote that he was never the same after discovering a website with “pages upon pages of these brutal black on white murders.” The pages that left Roof in disbelief were the product of a white-nationalist group subsidized by American taxpayers. The Council of Conservative Citizens Inc. is listed by the Internal Revenue…
On Thursday morning’s “Fox & Friends,” hosts Steve Doocy, Elisabeth Hasselbeck and Brian Kilmeade demonstrated a fairly impressive feat for a five-minute segment, denying that racism is a widespread problem in the U.S. then swiftly arguing that it isn’t their fault they didn’t know Dylann Storm Roof, the Charleston shooter, was a white supremacist. Hasselbeck…