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 […]

Read more

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 […]

Read more

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 […]

Read more

Ever since the current occupant of the White House blamed mainstream journalists for generating fake news, some of us have countered by blaming social media and armies of trolls and bots (robotic tweets). But it’s as silly to blame social media for causing fake news as it would be to blame the internal combustion engine […]

Read more

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 […]

Read more