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Faces Places - Agnès Varda’s Double Portrait

Patricia Storace The New York Review of Books
Faces Places (Visages Villages in French) is an unexpected—and perhaps final—gift from the visionary eighty-nine-year-old director Agnès Varda. Varda had previously announced that her 2008 documentary self-portrait, The Beaches of Agnès, would be her last film, doubting that she had the physical strength to undertake another full-length feature. But chance, which Varda has often acknowledged as her best assistant, intervened; the making of Faces Places is the proof.

Dark chocolate is now a health food. Here’s how that happened.

Julia Belluz Vox
Thanks to a decades-long effort by the chocolate industry, chocolate is now being convincingly sold as a health food. But the chocolate-industrial-research complex distracts us from issues like what in our food contributes to the obesity and diabetes epidemics; chocolate certainly isn’t the solution here.

My Father Imagines Winning the Lotto

Sara Borjas Sundog
Fresno poet Sara Borjas's poetry captures the imagination of an ordinary working man, ever hoping a windfall will land in his hands.

Police are the Problem, Not the Solution

Michael Hirsch The Indypendent
The author argues convincingly and in graphic detail that the problem with police in civil society is not just the lack of adequate training, police diversity, increased militarization or even police methods such as the routine brutalization of many people of color, but the dramatic and unprecedented expansion in the last four decades of the too-accepted social role of police. The problem, the sociologist-author insists, is policing itself.

Street Fighting Men

Luca Provenzano Los Angeles Review of Books
This book is an international history of the movement named "Antifa," discussing its roots and constraints. Reviewer Provenzano offers an assessment.

The Florida Project Creates a Beautiful Blast of Life on the Economic Edges of the Sunshine State

A.A. Dowd AV Club
As much as the film taps into a venerable tradition of observational realism (witnessing, never editorializing), it’s not “objective.” An indisputable ally of the disenfranchised, Baker honors his subjects by telling their stories honestly, without Hollywood distortion or flattering embellishment, and through a gaggle of actors mainly plucked from the area, not central casting.

The Podcast Taking on Racism in the Food Industry

J. Gabriel Ware Yes! Magazine
In the biweekly podcast, The Racist Sandwich, chef Soleil Ho and journalist Zahir Janmohamed discuss racism, classism, and gender in the food industry and the experiences of people of color working within it.