If you’re looking this summer to get a firmer grasp of African-American life and culture, these four intensely dynamic, wide-ranging books, enriched by vital, memorable language and compelling vision, can’t be beat.   Collected Poems by Robert Hayden This is a book I come back to time and again—a seminal work that illuminates African-American life […]

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Marey’s “fusile photographique”   In the late fifties, Diane Arbus spent summers skulking around Coney Island movie theatres and taking pictures of projections. In her ensuing image series, film noir vamps growled and sneered at her with the same ferocity as her subjects often did. “Onscreen woman with hoop earrings and a gun” (1958), on […]

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USAF Photo by SSGT Jacob N. Bailey    On May 16, journalist Michael Isikoff reported that the CIA inspector general’s office, the agency’s internal watchdog, admitted to “mistakenly” destroying its only copy of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s infamous 6,700-page torture report. While another copy is reported to exist elsewhere in the agency, little else is […]

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Image Credit: Marc Nozell   Can anyone capture the essence of Donald Trump? What, if anything, is at his core? Journalists have been trying to define Trump ever since his rise to prominence in New York in the 1970s. And since his presidential campaign accelerated last fall, the takes on Trump have multiplied exponentially. There’s no […]

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Trayvon Martin’s father Tracy Martin and mother Sybrina Fulton speak at a protest in New York City. Photo Credit: David Shankbone   When George Zimmerman shot Trayvon Martin, 2.7 million Americans had their eyes on LeBron James. It was the night of the NBA’s 2012 All-Star game. LeBron scored 36 points, with six rebounds and seven assists. […]

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