Uncategorized Archives - Page 2 of 47

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Why Asian Americans Need a Language Access Revolution, Now

Taking stock in the wake of the Atlanta spa murders

April 15, 2021 • by Jenny Choi

_____ On Tuesday, March 16, a white man killed eight people – among them six Asian American women – at a massage parlor in Georgia. Almost a week later, the 911 caller’s desperately hushed pleadings won’t leave my head. When I replay the woman’s voice – turning hard, Korean corners on hanging ...

Why Asian Americans Need a Language Access Revolution, Now

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What A Korean American Will Find in Minari

And what most Americans will miss about the Oscar-nominated film

April 15, 2021 • by Hannah H. Kim

_____When Parasite came out, I couldn’t bring myself to watch it. Looking back, it was for the same reason that I – a philosophy graduate student at Stanford – resisted Asian philosophy for six years: I didn’t want to be a typical Asian taking interest in Asian things. I wanted to ...

What A Korean American Will Find in Minari

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Wounds That Don’t Heal

A new movie about the Iraq war reminds us that soldiers have always been left to cope with the visible and invisible toll of war

April 15, 2021 • by Dillon J. Carroll

_____ On Friday March 12, Anthony and Joe Russo’s film Cherry was released on Apple TV+. Adapted from Nico Walker’s mostly autobiographical novel of the same name, it stars Tom Holland as Cherry, a Cleveland native who enlists in the Army and deploys to Iraq. There, he is traumatized by the ...

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Why Phillip Roth is a Great Jewish and a Great American Novelist

A new biography captures the whole man: his kindnesses, his pettiness and his prickeries

April 6, 2021 • by Mitchell Abidor

_____ There will undoubtedly be eye-rolling in some quarters over Blake Bailey’s 800-page biography of Philip Roth, that self-hating Jew/misogynist/self-absorbed relic of an era of history that America has (perhaps) outgrown. And yet, Philip Roth: The Biography – not a biography, the biography – is a book as sensibly, sensitively, and insightfully ...

Why Phillip Roth is a Great Jewish and a Great American Novelist

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The New Essentialism

Old ways of thinking are returning–again

March 25, 2021 • by Simon Garnett

_____ If we share the assumption that every culture is necessarily incomplete in itself and that there is no such thing as a self-contained, homogeneous culture, then the very definition of a given culture has to include what I would call inter-translatability. In other words, being-in-translation is an essential defining feature ...

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The Matzneff Affair: Should Love Have No Age Limit?

Sex and the Sixties, from Lolita to Vanessa Springora’s consent

March 16, 2021 • by Mitchell Abidor

_____ Almost every allegation of sexual aggression that has been made in these years of #MeToo has had “he said she said” moments. The woman accuses, the man denies or excuses, and the public chooses who they believe. The 1986 affair between the then 14-year-old Vanessa Springora and 50-year-old writer Gabriel ...

The Matzneff Affair: Should Love Have No Age Limit?

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How Shame Plays a Productive Role in Racial Justice

Rejecting “the hollowness of American life”

March 11, 2021 • by Benjamin P. Davis

_____ I want to suggest here that shame can be more than a feeling that ends in self-judgment. It can also be a spur to live differently. In other words, shame is not simply, as is sometimes asserted, a political dead end. On the contrary, shame can be politically productive in ...

How Shame Plays a Productive Role in Racial Justice

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How “White Privilege” Obscures Black Vulnerability

There is a crucial distinction between the laborer and the capitalist, but the psychological security that a white person gains from the objectification of the Black Other is of a different sort.

March 11, 2021 • by Mukasa Mubirumusoke

_____ The idea of white privilege has become indispensable in both academic and public conversations about race. It is the ultimate trump card to play when one wants to concisely and incisively describe the often unseen roadblocks that white people erect, which can thwart the thriving of non-white people. Undoubtedly you’ve ...

How “White Privilege” Obscures Black Vulnerability

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#OprahMeghanHarry

The mother of popular antiracism presents these retired royals, and their pain, as a lesson to us all

March 11, 2021 • by Claire Potter

_____ Is it surprising that Their Royal Highnesses, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex (otherwise known as Harry and Meghan) chose to make their first public statement about their decision to become private citizens on an Oprah Winfrey special? No: it is predictable. Any American who believes they have anything important to ...

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Democracy Doesn’t Happen By Accident

Black Americans fought for the Voting Rights Act, and Joe Biden wants it back

March 11, 2021 • by Heather Cox Richardson

_____ Black Americans outnumbered white Americans among the 29,500 people who lived in Selma, Alabama, in the 1960s, but the city’s voting rolls were 99% white. So in 1963, Black organizers in the Dallas County Voters League launched a drive to get Black voters in Selma registered. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating ...

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What’s the Greatest Story Dolly Parton Ever Wrote?

Beginning to understand a hero’s journey from Appalachia to pop-culture icon

March 9, 2021 • by Tressie McMillan Cottom

_____ I started the reading for my Dolly Parton passion project with Sarah Smarsh’s She Come By It Natural for no other reason than it was new and in stock at my local bookstore (Flyleaf Books). That is to say, for no good reason at all. I don’t intend to review these books, including ...

What’s the Greatest Story Dolly Parton Ever Wrote?

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Why Spit-Hoods Should Be Banned

A relic of slavery, they are inhumane and often deadly

March 4, 2021 • by Leslie Reagan

_____ In September, the world saw a video of Rochester, New York, police putting a spit hood over Daniel Prude’s head and face as he sat naked and handcuffed on a cold, wintry street. The mentally ill man was dead a week later. His death, the medical examiner declared, was homicide due to “complications ...