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Richard Brody looks at the life lessons of Harmony Korine’s movie, “Spring Breakers”: http://nyr.kr/147yiVT
(Source: newyorker.com)
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"There were slave revolts in the antebellum South. Someday, perhaps, someone will make a movie about one. For that someone, reading William Styron’s “The Confessions of Nat Turner” would be a good place to start. And “Django Unchained” could serve as a primer on what not to do. That this travesty was nominated for an Oscar for best original screenplay, let alone that it won, is an aesthetic and a moral scandal."
— Hendrik Hertzberg on “Django Unchained” and the context of slavery: http://nyr.kr/W8J4Gy(Source: newyorker.com)
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White Smoke and a Black Pope
Both because of his personality and the potential for a historic milestone, some journalists have taken to calling this papal election an “Obama moment” for the Church. This metaphor is apt only insofar as both will disappoint liberals hoping for significant change.
Naunihal Singh considers Cardinal Turkson of Ghana, who is favored to be the Church’s future: http://nyr.kr/ZGABhf
Photograph: Gabriel Bouys/Getty.
(Source: newyorker.com)
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"There’s no question that Beyoncé is a terrible judge of what is interesting about Beyoncé…"
— Jody Rosen reviews “Life is But a Dream,” a documentary that débuted Saturday on HBO and is starred-in, narrated, produced, co-directed, and co-written by Beyoncé (“Her most telling appearance in the credits, though, is under a curious heading: “Additional Cameras.”): http://nyr.kr/UJ5dMd(Source: newyorker.com)
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The Segregationist’s Daughter
Essie Mae Washington-Williams, the biracial daughter of segregationist Strom Thurmond, died this week. Here, Jelani Cobb reflects on the real lessons to be learned from Williams’s story, and on why, when Williams publicly revealed her patrilineage in 2003, the tale was shocking to many white observers, but it “little more than raised an eyebrow among many black ones”: http://nyr.kr/VKkPAn
Photograph: Tami Chappell/Reuters
(Source: newyorker.com)
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Richard Brody on the increasing gap between Lena Dunham and the character she plays in “Girls”: “That gap doesn’t make Dunham’s characterization less personal, only less contemporary—a work of fiction in which she plays a character that draws on memories or imagines a road not taken, but which, either way, casts on herself a shadow of regret and self-doubt.” Continue reading: http://nyr.kr/Xz9obw
Photograph: HBO.
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It seems almost pedantic to point out that slavery was nothing like this…
Jelani Cobb on Quentin Tarantino’s portrayal of slavery in “Django Unchained”: http://nyr.kr/VjguPH
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Michael Chabon’s Oakland
Chabon withholds any strong sociological claims about Oakland, but his novel evokes the city’s real racial folkways, the oddly winning blend of prickliness and sociability…
Matt Feeney on What Michael Chabon’s “Telegraph Avenue” gets right about Oakland: http://nyr.kr/QbHttB
Photograph by Ulf Andersen/Getty.
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Cartoon of the night by Zachary Kanin. For more: http://nyr.kr/QfuhEw
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Serena Williams has been a professional athlete longer than she has not—she turned pro at fourteen and is now thirty—yet she has never been allowed to be simply an athlete. She has served as a totem for issues relating to race, class, celebrity, sibling rivalry, family conflict, and body image. The last of those threatened to overshadow her latest run to a Grand Slam title…
Reeves Wiedeman on Serena Williams: Just a Tennis Player, Finally: http://nyr.kr/Qfy2d6
Photograph by Al Bello/Getty Images.
