The water in my eyes didn’t rise for Erik Stevens, aka Killmonger, a fictional character played by Michael B. Jordan in director Ryan Coogler’s blockbuster superhero film, Black Panther. The water in my eyes didn’t fall for the ancestors that Erik evokes in his final speech, either. The tears on my face as—spoiler alert—the only […]

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The Olympics have come to a close, and in their wake I’ve been thinking about a stubborn phenomenon that was illustrated most recently by the flak a New York Times columnist named Bari Weiss received after tweeting: “Immigrants get the job done,” together with a picture of Mirai Nagasu, the U.S. ice skater who won […]

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It seems pretty clear watching the reaction to Michael Wolff’s neutron bomb, Fire and Fury: We Americans, collectively, have gone out of our flipping minds. How can we let this fake president continue to personify us? The book, if hardly a literary masterwork, spills enough beans to bury Donald Trump, his clown-car inner circle, and […]

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The underdog Best Picture triumph at the 2017 Oscars of Barry Jenkins’s deeply affecting Moonlight, which already feels like a contemporary classic, over the lightweight, plucky, Hollywood fantasia La La Land, might be seen as a weather vane of sorts, an upbeat sign of the impact of the Black Lives Matter movement and the genuine […]

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Our Dishonest President The Los Angeles Times Editorial Board Introduction by Davan Maharaj and Nicholas Goldberg Berkeley: Heyday, 2017 On January 27, 2017, the Urban Dictionary added a new word: “Trumpion: A die-hard follower of Donald Trump.” The Trumpions loyally follow their president in word and in deed, defending his ever-changing manipulations of alternative reality […]

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