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Lerone Bennett, Jr. Wrote Black History into Modern America at Ebony Magazine
E. James West's new book explores Lerone Bennett, Jr.'s impact as a popular Black historian. It's a gateway to a body of work that still speaks to Black rage, struggle and hope, yesterday and today.
08 Jun 2020
Love in the Time of Coronavirus
What Will Come? COVID-19 and the Politics of Economic Depression
The financial crash of 2008-2010 reemphasized that traumatic economic shifts drive political change, so what might we imagine — or fear — will emerge from the COVID-19 depression?
05 Jun 2020
Books
How the Template for Modern Combat Journalism Developed
The superbly researched Journalism and the Russo-Japanese War tells readers how Japan pioneered modern techniques of propaganda and censorship in the Russo-Japanese War.
29 May 2020
Books
Crapification Syndrome: When Hilarity Slides into Nausea
No one living in America today can escape the blast radius of the questions raised in Wendy A. Woloson's Crap.
15 May 2020
Books
Home Computers: 100 Icons that Defined a Digital Generation (excerpt)
Whether you remember waiting for dial-up access, tiny screens, and green lines of text or not, you'll get a kick out of Alex Wiltshire's travel back in time to when computers came with wires. Enjoy this excerpt of Home Computers, courtesy of MIT press, with nostalgia photography by John Short.
Alex Wiltshire
06 May 2020
Film
Pudovkin Makes the Revolution Human: The Bolshevik Trilogy
Inspired by D.W. Griffith's Intolerance, Vsevolod Pudovkin would leave his chemistry studies for cinema. His films Mother, The End of St. Petersburg, and Storm over Asia are presented in The Bolshevik Trilogy.
27 Apr 2020
Film
'Camille Claudel' Features an Electrifying Performance by Isabelle Adjani
Through a brazen performance, one to obliterate all performances that came before, Isabelle Adjani gives her Claudel a true body in which to house all her drive and desire in Bruno Nuytten's Camille Claudel.
24 Apr 2020
Books
'Represented': Black Buying Power and the American Dream
The unheralded and underappreciated PR exec. Moss Kendrix is the de facto hero in Brenna Wynn Greer's enlightening history of Black marketers and the evolving depiction of Black people in mass media.
19 Mar 2020
Books
'Serenade for Nadia' Is a Beautifully Wrought Tale of Political Crimes Past and Present
Serenade for Nadia's complex plot allows Turkish author Zülfü Livaneli to sermonize on topics as varied as anti-Semitism, secularism and modernity, the role of faith in the modern world, diversity and multiculturalism, media and journalism, and more.
10 Mar 2020
Books
The 43 Group and the Moral Imperative to Fight Fascists
Anti-fascist militants have played an important role in protecting community and democracy. Daniel Sonabend's We Fight Fascists brings light to that battle against fascism in post-war Britain.
17 Feb 2020
Books
For All Governments: Gendry-Kim's Graphic Novel, 'Grass'
The powerful graphic novel Grass documents the atrocities against WWII "comfort women" through the recollections of a survivor. This is an incredibly powerful and urgent work that, frankly, should be read by the governments of all nations that must face, admit to, and begin real reparations for their country's atrocities.
12 Feb 2020
Film
Be Kind. Please Rewind: An Ode to the VCR
Like Netflix, the VCR diluted and transformed the film itself.
07 Feb 2020
Books
Why Do We Travel? On Erika Fatland's 'Sovietistan'
Social anthropologist Erika Fatland eschews many of the clichés of Post-Soviet travel writing, providing an incident-packed trip to a vast, often-overlooked region in Sovietistan.
23 Jan 2020
Film
The Kids Are Not All Right: Jean-Gabriel Périot's 'A German Youth'
Jean-Gabriel Périot's documentary on the rise and fall of Germany's radical Red Army Faction (RAF), A German Youth, warns how each generation's sins can evoke violent trauma amongst its progeny.
21 Jan 2020
Culture
From Zeus to Superman: Why Do Superheroes Keep Coming Back?
Why, despite all the knowledge we've gained and the technology we've harnessed, do we cling to our mythologies?
14 Jan 2020
Books
The Rolling Stones Go to College
The Cambridge Companion to the Rolling Stones, the first book of academic essays about the band, considers not only what the band accomplished, but why, 60 years since they formed, the Rolling Stones still matter.
13 Jan 2020
Featured: Top of Home Page
'Shapeshifters' and Other Trans-forming Humans
Supernatural Historian John Kachuba deftly demonstrates in Shapeshifters: A History that change is the only constant in life.
06 Dec 2019
Books
The Book Every American Needs to Read: 'Open Season: Legalized Genocide of Colored People'
Award-winning lawyer Ben Crump's Open Season irrefutably documents how America's treatment of Black Americans and other minorities is indistinguishable from genocide.
05 Dec 2019
Books
Tlatelolco '68: The Democratic Struggle That Refuses to Die
The Mexican student struggle of 1968 reaches forward to democratic struggles today. Captured by Paco Ignacio Taibo II in two works, 1982's Calling All Heroes and this year's '68: The Mexican Autumn of the Tlatelolco Massacre, it's a powerful reminder of the resilience of democracy.
18 Nov 2019
Books
Was the Great War a Supernatural War?
The memoirs of WWI soldiers are filled with references to seeing things that could not have been there. They knew that it was the war itself that haunted them, the war that became almost anthropomorphic, a self-conscious thing out to murder them.
01 Nov 2019
Film
Cynthia Erivo's Performance Carries Kasi Lemmons' 'Harriet'
Cynthia Erivo's transcendent turn as Union spy, escaped slave, and Underground Railroad conductor Harriet Tubman shines through Kasi Lemmons' heroic but oversimplified biopic, Harriet.
31 Oct 2019
Film
Bad and Mad: The Troubled and Troubling Pop Culture War Vet
In these trying times of Trump, as American chauvinism thumps its chest and loudly threatens those who question, there is little room for contemporary filmmakers, or policymakers, who encourage sympathy for the war-damaged, the wounded, the wrecked.
28 Oct 2019
Film
Rupert Goold's 'Judy' and the Queer-ing of the Biopic
Recent queer icon films Judy, Bohemian Rhapsody and Rocketman tease their key audience while keeping one foot solidly in straight land. Is this progress?
24 Oct 2019
Books
Ted Gioia's 'Music: A Subversive History' (By the Book)
"Sound," writes musician, author, and historian Ted Gioia in Music: A Subversive History, "is the ultimate source of genesis... A song can contain a cataclysm." In this beguiling excerpt, Gioia leads us to the sound of the universe itself.
Ted Gioia
22 Oct 2019
Books
'The View from Somewhere' Exposes the Dangerous Myth of 'Objective' Reporting
'Objectivity' in journalism has become a shield for privilege and a weapon for right-wing pundits, argues Lewis Raven Wallace in his work, The View from Somewhere: Undoing the Myth of Journalistic Objectivity.
18 Oct 2019
Books
The Cigarette: A Political History (By the Book)
Sarah Milov's The Cigarette restores politics to its rightful place in the tale of tobacco's rise and fall, illustrating America's continuing battles over corporate influence, individual responsibility, collective choice, and the scope of governmental power. Enjoy this excerpt from Chapter 5. "Inventing the Nonsmoker".
Sarah Milov
16 Oct 2019
Books
Revolutionary Victor Serge Has a Message for Our Times
Victor Serge, a rare survivor of Stalin's Terror, had a keen, razor-sharp intelligence and made observations that are highly relevant to our troubled times.
10 Oct 2019
Books
Move On Up: Chicago Soul Music and Black Cultural Power (By the Book)
In Move On Up, Aaron Cohen tells the remarkable story of the explosion of soul music in Chicago. This excerpt gives a taste of his engaging research into the rise of teenage culture and soul music's resistance against the city's infrastructural racism.
02 Oct 2019
Books
By the Book: I'd Fight the World: A Political History of Old-Time, Hillbilly, and Country Music
I'd Fight the World explores the connection between country music and electoral politics, giving us a glimpse into how politicians used celebrity long before the rise of the "movie-actor president" and the "Twitter president".
13 Sep 2019
Books
When Chicago Became a Shoppers' Paradise for Women, Men Had to Step Aside
Creating a culture of consumption in 20th century Chicago meant making space for shoppers, which meant integrating women into public life, in a downtown dominated by men. Historian Emily Remus revels in the ramifications of that cultural shift in A Shoppers' Paradise.
22 Aug 2019
Books
'Out of Our Minds' Considers Freedom and Force, Coercion and Custom
In Out of Our Minds, Fernández-Armesto encourages readers to distrust visionaries who promise perfection.
21 Aug 2019
Books
Generational Solidarity: Folk Band the Weavers and the Damages Done by the Red Scare
Wasn't That a Time digs into the Weaver's empathy for the working class struggle, which was weaponized and politicized against them by the House Un-American Activities Committee.
14 Aug 2019
Books
Bearing the Weight of Jane Brox's 'Silence'
Solitary confinement; monastic discipline; gender discrimination: In Silence, Jane Brox explores how our circumstances shape our ideals, showing how authority muffles her not so quiet subject.
12 Aug 2019
Comics
Fighting the '90s Culture Wars with Grant Morrison's 'The Invisibles'
In Pat Buchanan's 1992 presidential address he evoked fear of "crossdressers in our midst" as a metaphor for the infiltration of liberal political culture. Grant Morrison's The Invisibles comics proved he had reason to fear.
25 Jul 2019
Film
Fear the Capitalists, Not the Pagan Witch: William McGregor on His Film, 'Gwen'
Director William McGregor reflects on how his fantastical period film, Gwen, began as a reaction to mainstream television, and how the capitalist antagonist will allow the film to continue to resonate with audiences in the future.
22 Jul 2019
Books
On the Permeable Place Between Science and the Supernatural
Historian Richard Noakes interviews with PopMatters on his work, Physics and Psychics, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press, which offers fascinating insights into the 'heretical' activities of some of the most eminent scientists in Victorian Britain.
17 Jul 2019
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