Enrique Morones goes to Hollywood! In Detained in the Desert, Morones portrays Enrique Martinez, a character hybridizing the late human rights activist Roberto Martinez and Morones himself. “They wanted to make it as realistic as possible and George Clooney wasn’t available,” he cracks. It premiered at the Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival, and we wish all the best!
The New York Times reviews Ntozake Shange’s latest staged work, “Lost in Language and Sound: Or How I Found My Way to the Arts,” based on her 2011 book of the same title. She tells the Times, “Spell-check ruins my work … It fixes all my slang and dialect into standard English.” This predicament contextualizes one of her characters’ proclamations: “I can’t count the times I viscerally wanted to attack, deform and maim the language I was taught to hate myself in.”
“There is cool, there is super cool, and then there is Kathleen Hanna,” gushes the Sydney Morning Herald, recounting highlights from the new documentary The Punk Singer about Hanna’s life, music, and politics. “Hanna taught the Beastie Boys about feminism. That’s cool.”
Bruce Campbell talks about why Freddy vs. Jason vs. Ash never happened.
ThinkProgress spotlights Katie Stack’s work with the 1 in 3 campaign, named for the fact that 1 in 3 women will have an abortion in her lifetime, combating the stigma that society attaches to women who’ve had abortions. Although Stack regularly gets hate mail and death threats from people for her personal decisions and political activism, she counters, “I get emails from people I went to elementary school with, telling me, ‘Hey, I know we haven’t talked in ten years, but I had an abortion or I’m going to have an abortion and I just wanted to talk to someone about it.’ ”
“The story of malaria is inseparable from the history of poverty,” Sonia Shah writes at Foreign Affairs. From the author of The Fever, this article is a companion piece to Shah’s TED Talk wherein she recounts the unnecessary scourge and toll of a disease that has been curable since the 1600s, preventable since 1897, yet kills half a million people every year.
Harper’s Magazine interviews one of its “best-loved essayists,” Richard Rodriguez, about his revelations in his most recent book Darling, during the writing of which, “I surprised myself by becoming more interested in women and the desert religions and my relationship as a homosexual man to heterosexual women … My sense is that, instead of the Stonewall riots in New York, the real liberation of gay men began a century earlier with the processions of women in European streets and in North America demanding the vote. The women who left the parlor anticipated my escape from the closet.”
Steve Brodner at the LA Times gives a much-needed history lesson on Watergate— fully illustrated, of course.
Interviewed by BBC’s Newshour, Hassan Abbas chimes in about the recent meeting between President Obama and Pakistan’s new Prime Minister. “The U.S. drone strike policy is increasingly becoming a divisive issue between the two states, and this is likely to continue till Pakistan takes effective counterterrorism steps on its Pushtun frontier.”
NPR invites Arsalan Iftikhar on the air to talk about the NSA spying on German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the young Black engineering student who was frisked and harassed after buying an expensive belt at Barney’s, and the World Series. Iftikhar’s allegiance is with St. Louis. His fellow radio guest believes that the Sox are “a terrifying alliance of Venezuelans and Dominicans bent on robbing my people [Cubans and Puerto Ricans] of their heritage as keepers of the flame of American baseball … they need to be stopped.” Are the Sox stoppable? Boston doesn’t like to think so!
“Even after a couple of weeks of re-opened government, I still feel essentially shut down,” repines Kate Clinton at the Washington Blade. “I like to wonder what would have happened if women had tried to shut the government down? Odds are we would have been in orange onesies in Gitmo in two hours.”