“Salim used to tell me, “Shikha, there’s a place I go, where they teach art and stuff. Like puppets you make dance on a string.’” Remembering when she first heard of the school inside the brickfield, Shikha Patra slows down and glances up. “So I asked him,” she goes on, “‘Where is that?’” The little girl is remembering an early encounter with a student at Prayasam, a child-driven community organization located in the slums of Kolkata. Her surprise and curiosity soon give way to belief, when Shikha begins working with Amlan Ganguly, the community’s founder and primary counselor and teacher. As you come to see in Revolutionary Optimists, Maren R. Monsen and Nicole Newnham’s remarkable documentary premiering on PBS this month as part of Independent Lens, Ganguly brought to his project in 1996 passion and commitment, a determination to help the kids find their way out of poverty and into futures with hope, grounded in creativity and love and hard work. As impossible as this may seem at times, even when his students are forced into emotional difficulties, arranged marriages or hard labor to support their families, he persists. This is the extraordinary balance the film manages, celebrating the efforts at Prayasam and the successes, while never losing sight of the crises that define daily life for the kids growing up in the Kolkata slums.

See PopMatters’ review.

Growing up in the ‘60s and ‘70s, it was a yearly end of school ritual. We would sit in our living rooms, Libbyland Dinner’s cooling on the TV tray, waiting for the Big Three Networks (yes, we only had ABC, CBS, and NBC back then, along with PBS and various UHF options) to announce their Summer Saturday morning cartoon selections. We would wait to see what was returning, what Sid and Marty Krofft had up their sleeve, and what new offerings would become our watercooler (read: local park and/or playground) conversation pieces. Today, with 24-hour networks devoted to animation and dozens of daily examples to enjoy, there’s an overload that even the most ADD-addled child would find daunting. The same applies to adults who like animation. Certainly there are choices for the mature viewer within the kiddie spectrum, but sometime, the options are adult swim or Comedy Central oriented.

As recently pointed out by Andy Dehnart on his excellent reality TV blog, Realityblurred.com, the undoing of ABC’s recent reality diving show Splash was not the hokiness of its premise; nor the dimness of its celebrity wattage; nor even the egregiously unflattering bathing suits worn by the women.  No, it was the wildly inconsistent scoring of its panel of two judges.

With the intent of providing continued intelligent and entertaining content in the PopMatters’ Columns section, we are looking to broaden our staff of columnists and the voice of our writers’ community. We’re particularly interested in writers who live and work outside of the US, but that is not a deciding factor; in all cases, no matter the writer’s locale, we’re looking for those who can approach an array of cultural subject matter from their patch of the world with an international sensibility; that is, contextualize the local with an awareness of its place, historical and current, in the broader world.

Qualified writers are already readers of PopMatters (as but one vital supplement in their varied intellectual diet). They are familiar with the work of our current columnists, as well as other areas of the magazine, and they have a solid sense of what we’re looking for in content and caliber in these essays. We deliberately use the terms “essays” and “columns” interchangeably; as pieces are broad in scope yet grounded in real-world examples, and they are tied to regular deadlines and an established identity (and therein lay the “columnist” element). With these expectations in mind, we have monthly and every-other-month column slots available. Suitable writers are dedicated to regular deadlines and enjoy participating in friendly, ongoing communications with their editor.

If any claim to being the king of comedy in the social networking era means mastering multiple media platforms, then Marc Maron might just have the last laugh. In a career that has cut across various formats, from being a stand-up veteran to a gadfly talk-radio personality to the host of one of the most downloaded comedy podcasts around, WTF, Maron is now tackling TV with his own eponymous sitcom on IFC. Adding to his multimedia mini-empire is the original soundtrack to Maron, which features the likes of Sharon Jones & the Dap Kings, Hospitality, and Obits.