James Baldwin Digs Into the Roots of American Music
James Baldwin’s writing about music illuminates the significance of racial slavery for all American music. Black American music can help America to move forward if used properly.
Books
Features, reviews, interviews, and lists about books including cultural commentary and history, non-fiction, literature, and more.
We Can Only Imagine: The Consciousness of Physics
Physicist Ulf Danielsson’s The World Itself pins the powerful, slippery imagination and its impressive ideas about consciousness to matter’s messy, impermanent state.
Breaking the Habit: Can the US Kick a Century of Drug Dependence?
In Quick Fixes, Benjamin Y. Fong explores America’s stubborn addiction to drugs and looks beyond failed drug wars for a way to break the habit once and for all.
W. E. B. Du Bois’ Unfinished WWI History Speaks Volumes About America
W. E. B. Du Bois hoped that WWI would help Black Americans make gains at home after serving their country abroad. His work for racial progress, like America itself, remains unfinished.
Who Is the Monster in Claire Dederer’s ‘Monsters’?
In Monsters, Claire Dederer explores how fans’ “dumb love” of art can exist with “heartbreak” and unresolved feelings about monstrous artists.
No Sex Please, We’re British: Coil’s Subversively Overt Homosexuality
Homosexuality drove experimental band Coil’s creativity, yet they rejected the demand that they either embrace performative homosexuality or remain discreet and closeted.
I Dream of Wires: Richard Evans’ ‘Listening to the Music the Machines Make’
Electropop history Listening to the Music the Machines Make comprehensively and at times humorously zeros in on five critical years in UK music.
W.E.B. Du Bois’ Prescient Masterpiece ‘The Souls of Black Folk: A Graphic Interpretation’
Rutgers University Press’ engaging, accomplished interpretation of ‘The Souls of Black Folk’ confirms it as W.E.B. DuBois’ most prescient and indelible work.
Author John Wray on the Death Metal Novel as Flamethrower
Like the death and black metal bands it includes, John Wray’s novel Gone to the Wolves is a full-on assault on the senses that doesn’t hold back.
Talking About a Fashion Revolution: LGBTQ+ DapperQ
Anita Dolce Vita talks about the LGBTQ+ fashion DapperQ and its ungendered revolution against the status quo.
Rick Rubin’s Minimalist/Maximalist ‘The Creative Act’
Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act is, as his rap often was, minimalist and maximalist – musically austere but lyrically extravagant and self-aggrandizing.
‘Sink: A Memoir’ Shuns Respectability Politics
Sink is more than an ethnographic memoir. It’s a harrowing glimpse into an omnipresent but often unseen Americana.